# A Simple Latent Diffusion Approach for Panoptic Segmentation and Mask Inpainting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10227/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 81 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 81)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [What Matters When Repurposing Diffusion Models for General Dense Perception Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06090/) (2024)
- [Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12957/) (2024)
- [LaVin-DiT: Large Vision Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11505/) (2024)
- [SemFlow: Binding Semantic Segmentation and Image Synthesis via Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20282/) (2024)
- [PanSt3R: Multi-view Consistent Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21348/) (2025)
- [Unified Dense Prediction of Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09344/) (2025)
- [Explore In-Context Segmentation via Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09616/) (2024)
- [Generative Edge Detection with Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03080/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Model as a Generalist Segmentation Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24575/) (2026)
- [Investigating the Effectiveness of Cross-Attention to Unlock Zero-Shot Editing of Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05519/) (2024)
- [A Simple and Generalist Approach for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16504/) (2024)
- [Zippo: Zipping Color and Transparency Distributions into a Single Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11077/) (2024)
- [More Than Generation: Unifying Generation and Depth Estimation via Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23574/) (2025)
- [FMS2: Unified Flow Matching for Segmentation and Synthesis of Thin Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13659/) (2026)
- [Guided Synthesis of Labeled Brain MRI Data Using Latent Diffusion Models for Segmentation of Enlarged Ventricles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01351/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Vector Field Learning for Generative Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19218/) (2026)
- [InstEditSeg: Instruction-Driven Image Editing for Polyp and Skin Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02004/) (2026)
- [AHMAD: Adaptive Hybrid Multi-task Vision Learning with Assisted Distillation for Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35490/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Panoptic and instance segmentation networks are often trained with specialized object detection modules, complex loss functions, and ad-hoc post-processing steps to manage the permutation-invariance of the instance masks. This work builds upon Stable Diffusion and proposes a latent diffusion approach for panoptic segmentation, resulting in a simple architecture that omits these complexities. Our training consists of two steps: (1) training a shallow autoencoder to project the segmentation masks to latent space; (2) training a diffusion model to allow image-conditioned sampling in latent space. This generative approach unlocks the exploration of mask completion or inpainting. The experimental validation on COCO and ADE20k yields strong segmentation results. Finally, we demonstrate our model's adaptability to multi-tasking by introducing learnable task embeddings.