# Lossy Compression with Pretrained Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09815 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09815/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion for compression and wireless, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 31 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jan 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion for compression and wireless](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-for-compression-and-wireless/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14687/) (2022)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [Joint Autoregressive and Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02736/) (2018)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [DeepCache: Accelerating Diffusion Models for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00858/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [Hard Prompts Made Easy: Gradient-Based Discrete Optimization for Prompt Tuning and Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03668/) (2023)
- [PIPAL: a Large-Scale Image Quality Assessment Dataset for Perceptual Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12142/) (2020)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06950/) (2022)
- [Towards image compression with perfect realism at ultra-low bitrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10325/) (2023)
- [Improving Statistical Fidelity for Neural Image Compression with Implicit Local Likelihood Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11189/) (2023)
- [Lossy Compression with Gaussian Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08889/) (2022)
- [Text + Sketch: Image Compression at Ultra Low Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01944/) (2023)
- [Towards Extreme Image Compression with Latent Feature Guidance and Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18820/) (2024)
- [Minimal Random Code Learning: Getting Bits Back from Compressed Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00440/) (2018)
- [Visual Anagrams: Generating Multi-View Optical Illusions with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17919/) (2023)
- [ElasticDiffusion: Training-free Arbitrary Size Image Generation through Global-Local Content Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18822/) (2023)
- [Algorithms for the Communication of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12805/) (2021)
- [Idempotence and Perceptual Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08920/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [One-Step Diffusion-Based Image Compression with Semantic Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16687/) (2025)
- [CoD: A Diffusion Foundation Model for Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18706/) (2025)
- [Turbo-DDCM: Fast and Flexible Zero-Shot Diffusion-Based Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06424/) (2025)
- [Ultra-Low Bitrate Perceptual Image Compression with Shallow Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12229/) (2025)
- [Dual-Representation Image Compression at Ultra-Low Bitrates via Explicit Semantics and Implicit Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05213/) (2026)
- [GVCC: Zero-Shot Video Compression via Codebook-Driven Stochastic Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26571/) (2026)
- [Steering One-Step Diffusion Model with Fidelity-Rich Decoder for Fast Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04979/) (2025)
- [Next-Frame Decoding for Ultra-Low-Bitrate Image Compression with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15129/) (2026)
- [ZeroGVC: Zero-Shot Generative Video Compression with Autoregressive Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22371/) (2026)
- [Scalable Differentially Private Data Compression via Diffusion and Stochastic Codes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03392/) (2026)
- [Compression as Adaptation: Implicit Visual Representation with Diffusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07615/) (2026)
- [Training-Free Vector Quantization via Gaussian VAEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06609/) (2025)
- [Advances in Diffusion-Based Generative Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18932/) (2026)
- [PerCoV2: Ultra-Low Bit-Rate Perceptual Image Compression via Query-Based 1D Multimodal Image Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09368/) (2025)
- [FaSDiff: Balancing Perception and Semantics in Face Compression via Stable Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05870/) (2025)
- [Generative Semantic Coding for Ultra-Low Bitrate Visual Communication and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27324/) (2025)
- [Training-Free Rate-Distortion-Perception Traversal With Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04005/) (2026)
- [Region-Adaptive Generative Compression with Spatially Varying Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01122/) (2026)
- [On the Robustness of Diffusion-Based Image Compression to Bit-Flip Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05743/) (2026)
- [Few-step Generative Models as Lossy Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10450/) (2026)
- [Scalable Discrete-to-Continuous Channel Simulation for Compression and Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12067/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Generative Image Compression at Extremely Low Bitrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39315/) (2026)
- [ResARC: Residual-Aware AutoRegressive Coding for Ultra-Low Bitrate Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39451/) (2026)
- [H-DDCM: Hadamard Codebooks for Fast Generative Image and Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18125/) (2026)
- [Recasting DiT for Extreme Image Compression with Hierarchical Visual Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18607/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We apply the DiffC algorithm (Theis et al. 2022) to Stable Diffusion 1.5, 2.1, XL, and Flux-dev, and demonstrate that these pretrained models are remarkably capable lossy image compressors. A principled algorithm for lossy compression using pretrained diffusion models has been understood since at least Ho et al. 2020, but challenges in reverse-channel coding have prevented such algorithms from ever being fully implemented. We introduce simple workarounds that lead to the first complete implementation of DiffC, which is capable of compressing and decompressing images using Stable Diffusion in under 10 seconds. Despite requiring no additional training, our method is competitive with other state-of-the-art generative compression methods at low ultra-low bitrates.