# StableCodec: Taming One-Step Diffusion for Extreme Image Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21977 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21977/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 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 63 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 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 63)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [Joint Autoregressive and Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02736/) (2018)
- [Learned Image Compression with Discretized Gaussian Mixture Likelihoods and Attention Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01568/) (2020)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [Perception Prioritized Training of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00227/) (2022)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [Channel-wise Autoregressive Entropy Models for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08739/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks for Extreme Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02958/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Lossy Compression: The Rate-Distortion-Perception Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07821/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Generative Neural Video Compression via Video Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05016/) (2025)
- [Single-step Diffusion-based Video Coding with Semantic-Temporal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07480/) (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)
- [CoD-Lite: Real-Time Diffusion-Based Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12525/) (2026)
- [Dual-Representation Image Compression at Ultra-Low Bitrates via Explicit Semantics and Implicit Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05213/) (2026)
- [DiT-IC: Aligned Diffusion Transformer for Efficient Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13162/) (2026)
- [Differentiable Vector Quantization for Rate-Distortion Optimization of Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10546/) (2026)
- [ProGIC: Progressive and Lightweight Generative Image Compression with Residual Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02897/) (2026)
- [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)
- [CADC: Content Adaptive Diffusion-Based Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21591/) (2026)
- [Advances in Diffusion-Based Generative Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18932/) (2026)
- [Dual-Latent Collaborative Decoding for Fidelity-Perception Balanced Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14391/) (2026)
- [Exploiting Semantic and Pixel Representations for Ultra-Low Bitrate Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01608/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking and Enhancing VLM for Compressed Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20901/) (2025)
- [A Causal Diffusion Model for Video Reconstruction from Ultra-Low-Bitrate Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13837/) (2026)
- [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)
- [Efficient Learned Image Compression without Entropy Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23323/) (2026)
- [FlowCodec: One-Step Flow Prior for Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21030/) (2026)
- [Group-of-Latents: Perceptual Video Compression at Extreme Bitrates via Masked Latent Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19437/) (2026)
- [FLM: Frequency-Aware Language Models for Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28687/) (2026)
- [Tree-VQ: Progressive Image Compression from Pretrained Vector Quantizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03641/) (2026)
- [Rate-Adaptive One-Step Diffusion Compression for AIGC Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31795/) (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)
- [A Spatiotemporal Semantic Importance-Guided Unified Compression and Editing Framework for AI-Generated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05779/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion-based image compression has shown remarkable potential for achieving ultra-low bitrate coding (less than 0.05 bits per pixel) with high realism, by leveraging the generative priors of large pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models. However, current approaches require a large number of denoising steps at the decoder to generate realistic results under extreme bitrate constraints, limiting their application in real-time compression scenarios. Additionally, these methods often sacrifice reconstruction fidelity, as diffusion models typically fail to guarantee pixel-level consistency. To address these challenges, we introduce StableCodec, which enables one-step diffusion for high-fidelity and high-realism extreme image compression with improved coding efficiency. To achieve ultra-low bitrates, we first develop an efficient Deep Compression Latent Codec to transmit a noisy latent representation for a single-step denoising process. We then propose a Dual-Branch Coding Structure, consisting of a pair of auxiliary encoder and decoder, to enhance reconstruction fidelity. Furthermore, we adopt end-to-end optimization with joint bitrate and pixel-level constraints. Extensive experiments on the CLIC 2020, DIV2K, and Kodak dataset demonstrate that StableCodec outperforms existing methods in terms of FID, KID and DISTS by a significant margin, even at bitrates as low as 0.005 bits per pixel, while maintaining strong fidelity. Additionally, StableCodec achieves inference speeds comparable to mainstream transform coding schemes. All source code are available at https://github.com/LuizScarlet/StableCodec.