# Generative AI in Vision: A Survey on Models, Metrics and Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16369 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16369/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 67 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02762/) (2019)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [An Introduction to Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02691/) (2019)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Rapid Review of Generative AI in Smart Medical Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06627/) (2024)
- [GenAI Confessions: Black-box Membership Inference for Generative Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06399/) (2025)
- [GDGB: A Benchmark for Generative Dynamic Text-Attributed Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03267/) (2025)
- [SFNet: Fusion of Spatial and Frequency-Domain Features for Remote Sensing Image Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20599/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative AI models have revolutionized various fields by enabling the creation of realistic and diverse data samples. Among these models, diffusion models have emerged as a powerful approach for generating high-quality images, text, and audio. This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of generative AI diffusion and legacy models, focusing on their underlying techniques, applications across different domains, and their challenges. We delve into the theoretical foundations of diffusion models, including concepts such as denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) and score-based generative modeling. Furthermore, we explore the diverse applications of these models in text-to-image, image inpainting, and image super-resolution, along with others, showcasing their potential in creative tasks and data augmentation. By synthesizing existing research and highlighting critical advancements in this field, this survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of generative AI diffusion and legacy models and inspire future innovations in this exciting area of artificial intelligence.