Your ViT is Secretly a Hybrid Discriminative-Generative Diffusion Model
On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion foundations and sampling
Abstract (arXiv)
Diffusion Denoising Probability Models (DDPM) and Vision Transformer (ViT) have demonstrated significant progress in generative tasks and discriminative tasks, respectively, and thus far these models have largely been developed in their own domains. In this paper, we establish a direct connection between DDPM and ViT by integrating the ViT architecture into DDPM, and introduce a new generative model called Generative ViT (GenViT). The modeling flexibility of ViT enables us to further extend GenViT to hybrid discriminative-generative modeling, and introduce a Hybrid ViT (HybViT). Our work is among the first to explore a single ViT for image generation and classification jointly. We conduct a series of experiments to analyze the performance of proposed models and demonstrate their superiority over prior state-of-the-arts in both generative and discriminative tasks. Our code and pre-trained models can be found in https://github.com/sndnyang/Diffusion_ViT .
Key facts. Cited by 58 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 57 of its 68 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2022.
Builds on
57 of 68 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2022Analytic-DPM: an Analytic Estimate of the Optimal Reverse Variance in Diffusion Probabilistic Models17 Jan
- 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis11 May
- 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models18 Feb
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations26 Nov
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models19 Jun
Other references · 52
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 4; 2023: 20; 2024: 20; 2025: 9; 2026: 5.
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- 2022Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applicationscited by 1,114
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- 2022All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Modelscited by 502
- 2023Fast Training of Diffusion Models with Masked Transformerscited by 176
- 2024Learning-to-Cache: Accelerating Diffusion Transformer via Layer Cachingcited by 142
- 2023Denoising Diffusion Autoencoders are Unified Self-supervised Learnerscited by 130
- 2024Scalable High-Resolution Pixel-Space Image Synthesis with Hourglass Diffusion Transformerscited by 118
- 2023Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 109
- 2023DiffiT: Diffusion Vision Transformers for Image Generationcited by 106
- 2023Robust Classification via a Single Diffusion Modelcited by 79
- 2024PTQ4DiT: Post-training Quantization for Diffusion Transformerscited by 79
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- 2026Learning A Unified Template for Gait Recognition16 Sep 2026
- 2026Revisiting Spectral Representations in Generative Diffusion Models8 Sep 2026
- 2026Teacher-Feature Drifting: One-Step Diffusion Distillation with Pretrained Diffusion Representations8 May 2026
- 2025Pattern-Guided Diffusion Models15 Dec 2025
- 2025Improving Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture with Diffusion Noise21 Jul 2025
- 2025Learning Diffusion Models with Flexible Representation Guidance11 Jul 2025
- 2025SARA: Structural and Adversarial Representation Alignment for Training-efficient Diffusion Models11 Mar 2025
- 2025Unleashing the Potential of Pre-Trained Diffusion Models for Generalizable Person Re-Identification10 Feb 2025
- 2025Exploring Structured Semantic Priors Underlying Diffusion Score for Test-time Adaptation1 Jan 2025
- 2024LazyDiT: Lazy Learning for the Acceleration of Diffusion Transformers17 Dec 2024
- 2024Remix-DiT: Mixing Diffusion Transformers for Multi-Expert Denoising7 Dec 2024
- 2024Pretrained Reversible Generation as Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning29 Nov 2024
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- 2026GenMask: Adapting DiT for Segmentation via Direct Mask Generationcited by 3
- 2025Beyond the Generative Learning Trilemma: Generative Model Assessment in Data Scarcity Domainscited by 1
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- 2026GenMask: Adapting DiT for Segmentation via Direct Mask Generation25 Mar 2026
- 2025Linear Differential Vision Transformer: Learning Visual Contrasts via Pairwise Differentials2 Nov 2025
- 2025Beyond the Generative Learning Trilemma: Generative Model Assessment in Data Scarcity Domains14 Apr 2025
- 2024Lateralization MLP: A Simple Brain-inspired Architecture for Diffusion25 May 2024
- 2023Towards understanding neural collapse in supervised contrastive learning with the information bottleneck method19 May 2023
- 2023Transformer-based Generative Adversarial Networks in Computer Vision: A Comprehensive Survey17 Feb 2023
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