# Boosting Generative Image Modeling via Joint Image-Feature Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16064 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16064/

## Key facts

- Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 66 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11690/) (2025)
- [Latent Diffusion Model without Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15301/) (2025)
- [What matters for Representation Alignment: Global Information or Spatial Structure?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10794/) (2025)
- [Scaling Text-to-Image Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16208/) (2026)
- [Coevolutionary Continuous Discrete Diffusion: Make Your Diffusion Language Model a Latent Reasoner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03206/) (2025)
- [Selective Underfitting in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01378/) (2025)
- [Semantics Lead the Way: Harmonizing Semantic and Texture Modeling with Asynchronous Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04926/) (2025)
- [Adapting Self-Supervised Representations as a Latent Space for Efficient Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14630/) (2025)
- [Learning on the Manifold: Unlocking Standard Diffusion Transformers with Representation Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10099/) (2026)
- [SVG-T2I: Scaling Up Text-to-Image Latent Diffusion Model Without Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11749/) (2025)
- [Phantom: Physics-Infused Video Generation via Joint Modeling of Visual and Latent Physical Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08503/) (2026)
- [How to Train Your Latent Diffusion Language Model Jointly With the Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07933/) (2026)
- [RefAlign: Representation Alignment for Reference-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25743/) (2026)
- [CoVAR: Co-generation of Video and Action for Robotic Manipulation via Multi-Modal Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16023/) (2025)
- [What Matters for Diffusion-Friendly Latent Manifold? Prior-Aligned Autoencoders for Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07915/) (2026)
- [Pulp Motion: Framing-aware multimodal camera and human motion generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05097/) (2025)
- [DreamWorld: Unified World Modeling in Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00466/) (2026)
- [MeanFlow Transformers with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13019/) (2025)
- [SemanticGen: Video Generation in Semantic Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20619/) (2025)
- [VFMF: World Modeling by Forecasting Vision Foundation Model Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11225/) (2025)
- [REGLUE Your Latents with Global and Local Semantics for Entangled Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16636/) (2025)
- [Cascaded Flow Matching for Heterogeneous Tabular Data with Mixed-Type Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22816/) (2026)
- [Beyond Point-Wise Matching: Structural Representation Alignment for Accelerating Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16949/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Conditioning with Representation-Aligned Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03753/) (2026)
- [V-Co: A Closer Look at Visual Representation Alignment via Co-Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16792/) (2026)
- [MaskAlign: Token-Subset Representation Alignment for Efficient Diffusion Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08788/) (2026)
- [ReWorld: Representation Learning for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27504/) (2026)
- [JointHOI: Jointly Generating Contact Maps Enhances Hand Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01768/) (2026)
- [MixFlow Training: Alleviating Exposure Bias with Slowed Interpolation Mixture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19311/) (2025)
- [WiT: Waypoint Diffusion Transformers for Alleviating Trajectory Conflict in Pixel-Space Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15132/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) dominate high-quality image generation, yet integrating representation learning with generative modeling remains a challenge. We introduce a novel generative image modeling framework that seamlessly bridges this gap by leveraging a diffusion model to jointly model low-level image latents (from a variational autoencoder) and high-level semantic features (from a pretrained self-supervised encoder like DINO). Our latent-semantic diffusion approach learns to generate coherent image-feature pairs from pure noise, significantly enhancing both generative quality and training efficiency, all while requiring only minimal modifications to standard Diffusion Transformer architectures. By eliminating the need for complex distillation objectives, our unified design simplifies training and unlocks a powerful new inference strategy: Representation Guidance, which leverages learned semantics to steer and refine image generation. Evaluated in both conditional and unconditional settings, our method delivers substantial improvements in image quality and training convergence speed, establishing a new direction for representation-aware generative modeling. Project page and code: https://representationdiffusion.github.io