mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics

arXiv 1503.03585 ↗First posted 12 Mar 2015cs.LG cond-mat.dis-nn q-bio.NCcited by 7,005

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 4,507 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

A central problem in machine learning involves modeling complex data-sets using highly flexible families of probability distributions in which learning, sampling, inference, and evaluation are still analytically or computationally tractable. Here, we develop an approach that simultaneously achieves both flexibility and tractability. The essential idea, inspired by non-equilibrium statistical physics, is to systematically and slowly destroy structure in a data distribution through an iterative forward diffusion process. We then learn a reverse diffusion process that restores structure in data, yielding a highly flexible and tractable generative model of the data. This approach allows us to rapidly learn, sample from, and evaluate probabilities in deep generative models with thousands of layers or time steps, as well as to compute conditional and posterior probabilities under the learned model. We additionally release an open source reference implementation of the algorithm.

Key facts. Cited by 7,005 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2015.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2020: 3; 2021: 102; 2022: 440; 2023: 1650; 2024: 1964; 2025: 1822; 2026: 1024.

7,005 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,655
  3. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,185
  4. 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latentscited by 6,539
  5. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,322
  6. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 5,931
  7. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,717
  8. 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 5,466
  9. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
  10. 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,290
  11. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,094
  12. 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 3,736
38 more
  1. 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 3,595
  2. 2022DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generationcited by 3,286
  3. 2022DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusioncited by 3,006
  4. 2022Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Modelscited by 2,994
  5. 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructionscited by 2,591
  6. 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasetscited by 2,526
  7. 2022Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Controlcited by 2,409
  8. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
  9. 2022Video Diffusion Modelscited by 2,280
  10. 2022DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Stepscited by 1,961
  11. 2021SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 1,903
  12. 2023Consistency Modelscited by 1,778
  13. 2022Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Modelscited by 1,765
  14. 2023VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 1,755
  15. 2021Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spacescited by 1,665
  16. 2021Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinementcited by 1,506
  17. 2023Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Objectcited by 1,483
  18. 2023Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 1,465
  19. 2023IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,439
  20. 2022RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 1,419
  21. 2020DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesiscited by 1,339
  22. 2023T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,339
  23. 2021Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,296
  24. 2022Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creationcited by 1,285
  25. 2023ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillationcited by 1,207
  26. 2022Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 1,172
  27. 2022Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 1,168
  28. 2021Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generationcited by 1,155
  29. 2021Variational Diffusion Modelscited by 1,145
  30. 2022Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applicationscited by 1,107
  31. 2022Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusioncited by 1,099
  32. 2022Human Motion Diffusion Modelcited by 1,062
  33. 2022Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesiscited by 1,023
  34. 2023ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 1,010
  35. 2022Diffusion Models in Vision: A Surveycited by 1,008
  36. 2022Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generationcited by 1,006
  37. 2022Token Merging: Your ViT But Fastercited by 995
  38. 2023One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillationcited by 978

50 most cited of 7,005 All 7,005 (JSON)