# DICEPTION: A Generalist Diffusion Model for Visual Perceptual Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17157 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17157/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 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 119 of its 142 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2025.

## 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 119)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (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)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [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)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [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)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [VQ-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action Models via Scaling Vector-Quantized Action Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01016/) (2025)
- [Image Generators are Generalist Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20329/) (2026)
- [VisualCloze: A Universal Image Generation Framework via Visual In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07960/) (2025)
- [SegAgent: Exploring Pixel Understanding Capabilities in MLLMs by Imitating Human Annotator Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08625/) (2025)
- [From Editor to Dense Geometry Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04338/) (2025)
- [OmniVDiff: Omni Controllable Video Diffusion for Generation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10825/) (2025)
- [Lotus-2: Advancing Geometric Dense Prediction with Powerful Image Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01030/) (2025)
- [Video Generation Models are General-Purpose Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09024/) (2026)
- [PRISM: A Unified Framework for Photorealistic Reconstruction and Intrinsic Scene Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14219/) (2025)
- [Tinker: Diffusion's Gift to 3D--Multi-View Consistent Editing From Sparse Inputs without Per-Scene Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14811/) (2025)
- [COOPER: A Unified Model for Cooperative Perception and Reasoning in Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04563/) (2025)
- [Alleviating Sparse Rewards by Modeling Step-Wise and Long-Term Sampling Effects in Flow-Based GRPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06422/) (2026)
- [Vision as Unified Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06560/) (2026)
- [CtrlVDiff: Controllable Video Generation via Unified Multimodal Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21129/) (2025)
- [Jodi: Unification of Visual Generation and Understanding via Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19084/) (2025)
- [THFM: A Unified Video Foundation Model for 4D Human Perception and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25892/) (2026)
- [VideoMaMa: Mask-Guided Video Matting via Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14255/) (2026)
- [Diffusion Model as a Generalist Segmentation Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24575/) (2026)
- [MARBLE: Multi-Aspect Reward Balance for Diffusion RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06507/) (2026)
- [From Ideal to Real: Unified and Data-Efficient Dense Prediction for Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20279/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Visual Intelligence: Insights from Video Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24448/) (2025)
- [MMPhysVideo: Physically Plausible Video Generation Through Joint RGB-Perception Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02817/) (2026)
- [UniVidX: A Unified Multimodal Framework for Versatile Video Generation via Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00658/) (2026)
- [gen2seg: Generative Models Enable Generalizable Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15263/) (2025)
- [StableMTL: Repurposing Latent Diffusion Models for Multi-Task Learning from Partially Annotated Synthetic Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08013/) (2025)
- [TransNormal: Dense Visual Semantics for Diffusion-based Transparent Object Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00839/) (2026)
- [Visual Bridge: Universal Visual Perception Representations Generating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07877/) (2025)
- [Preserving Source Video Realism: High-Fidelity Face Swapping for Cinematic Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07951/) (2025)
- [Marigold V2: Revisiting Diffusion Transformers for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08084/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper's primary objective is to develop a robust generalist perception model capable of addressing multiple tasks under constraints of computational resources and limited training data. We leverage text-to-image diffusion models pre-trained on billions of images and successfully introduce our DICEPTION, a visual generalist model. Exhaustive evaluations demonstrate that DICEPTION effectively tackles diverse perception tasks, even achieving performance comparable to SOTA single-task specialist models. Specifically, we achieve results on par with SAM-vit-h using only 0.06% of their data (e.g., 600K vs. 1B pixel-level annotated images). We designed comprehensive experiments on architectures and input paradigms, demonstrating that the key to successfully re-purposing a single diffusion model for multiple perception tasks lies in maximizing the preservation of the pre-trained model's prior knowledge. Consequently, DICEPTION can be trained with substantially lower computational costs than conventional models requiring training from scratch. Furthermore, adapting DICEPTION to novel tasks is highly efficient, necessitating fine-tuning on as few as 50 images and approximately 1% of its parameters. Finally, we demonstrate that a subtle application of classifier-free guidance can improve the model's performance on depth and normal estimation. We also show that pixel-aligned training, as is characteristic of perception tasks, significantly enhances the model's ability to preserve fine details. DICEPTION offers valuable insights and presents a promising direction for the development of advanced diffusion-based visual generalist models. Code and Model: https://github.com/aim-uofa/Diception