# Regeneration Learning: A Learning Paradigm for Data Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.08846 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08846/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07947/) (2016)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [NaturalSpeech 2: Latent Diffusion Models are Natural and Zero-Shot Speech and Singing Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09116/) (2023)
- [PeriodWave: Multi-Period Flow Matching for High-Fidelity Waveform Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07547/) (2024)
- [ReGeneration Learning of Diffusion Models with Rich Prompts for Zero-Shot Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04651/) (2023)
- [Vibravox: A Dataset of French Speech Captured with Body-conduction Audio Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11828/) (2024)
- [Accelerating High-Fidelity Waveform Generation via Adversarial Flow Matching Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08019/) (2024)
- [DUNIA: Pixel-Sized Embeddings via Cross-Modal Alignment for Earth Observation Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17066/) (2025)
- [SoundMorpher: Perceptually-Uniform Sound Morphing with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02144/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine learning methods for conditional data generation usually build a mapping from source conditional data X to target data Y. The target Y (e.g., text, speech, music, image, video) is usually high-dimensional and complex, and contains information that does not exist in source data, which hinders effective and efficient learning on the source-target mapping. In this paper, we present a learning paradigm called regeneration learning for data generation, which first generates Y' (an abstraction/representation of Y) from X and then generates Y from Y'. During training, Y' is obtained from Y through either handcrafted rules or self-supervised learning and is used to learn X-->Y' and Y'-->Y. Regeneration learning extends the concept of representation learning to data generation tasks, and can be regarded as a counterpart of traditional representation learning, since 1) regeneration learning handles the abstraction (Y') of the target data Y for data generation while traditional representation learning handles the abstraction (X') of source data X for data understanding; 2) both the processes of Y'-->Y in regeneration learning and X-->X' in representation learning can be learned in a self-supervised way (e.g., pre-training); 3) both the mappings from X to Y' in regeneration learning and from X' to Y in representation learning are simpler than the direct mapping from X to Y. We show that regeneration learning can be a widely-used paradigm for data generation (e.g., text generation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, music composition, image generation, and video generation) and can provide valuable insights into developing data generation methods.