mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Visual Bridge: Universal Visual Perception Representations Generating

arXiv 2511.07877 ↗First posted 11 Nov 2025cs.CVcited by 1

On the map: Diffusion models → Image generation, text-to-image and editing

Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in isolated computer vision tasks such as text-to-image generation, depth estimation, and optical flow. However, these models are often restricted by a ``single-task-single-model'' paradigm, severely limiting their generalizability and scalability in multi-task scenarios. Motivated by the cross-domain generalization ability of large language models, we propose a universal visual perception framework based on flow matching that can generate diverse visual representations across multiple tasks. Our approach formulates the process as a universal flow-matching problem from image patch tokens to task-specific representations rather than an independent generation or regression problem. By leveraging a strong self-supervised foundation model as the anchor and introducing a multi-scale, circular task embedding mechanism, our method learns a universal velocity field to bridge the gap between heterogeneous tasks, supporting efficient and flexible representation transfer. Extensive experiments on classification, detection, segmentation, depth estimation, and image-text retrieval demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, outperforming prior generalist and several specialist models. Ablation studies further validate the robustness, scalability, and generalization of our framework. Our work marks a significant step towards general-purpose visual perception, providing a solid foundation for future research in universal vision modeling.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 29 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2025.

Builds on

29 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025DICEPTION: A Generalist Diffusion Model for Visual Perceptual Tasks24 Feb

Other references · 28

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
  2. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  3. 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
  4. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  5. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,498
  6. 2015Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networkscited by 9,617
  7. 2020End-to-End Object Detection with Transformerscited by 7,384
  8. 2021Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learnerscited by 7,339
  9. 2021Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformerscited by 6,893
  10. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  11. 2020Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attentioncited by 4,560
  12. 2023InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Taskscited by 2,534
16 more
  1. 2021Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentationcited by 2,338
  2. 2019Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfercited by 1,484
  3. 2024Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Datacited by 1,346
  4. 2024DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understandingcited by 718
  5. 2022Unified-IO: A Unified Model for Vision, Language, and Multi-Modal Taskscited by 420
  6. 2024Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimationcited by 389
  7. 2022Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learningcited by 317
  8. 2023Unified-IO 2: Scaling Autoregressive Multimodal Models with Vision, Language, Audio, and Actioncited by 301
  9. 2024GeoWizard: Unleashing the Diffusion Priors for 3D Geometry Estimation from a Single Imagecited by 283
  10. 2020Learning to Recover 3D Scene Shape from a Single Imagecited by 214
  11. 2024DINO-X: A Unified Vision Model for Open-World Object Detection and Understandingcited by 85
  12. 2024DepthFM: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation with Flow Matchingcited by 76
  13. 2020DiverseDepth: Affine-invariant Depth Prediction Using Diverse Datacited by 60
  14. 2024One Diffusion to Generate Them Allcited by 41
  15. 2024Multi-view Aggregation Network for Dichotomous Image Segmentationcited by 28
  16. 2024ExPLoRA: Parameter-Efficient Extended Pre-Training to Adapt Vision Transformers under Domain Shiftscited by 16

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

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  1. 2026Representation Learning in Diffusion and Flow-based Model: An Application Aspect
  2. 2024Bridging Generative and Discriminative Models for Unified Visual Perception with Diffusion Priors
  3. 2024Scaling Properties of Diffusion Models for Perceptual Tasks
  4. 2023Harnessing Diffusion Models for Visual Perception with Meta Prompts
  5. 2023Do text-free diffusion models learn discriminative visual representations?
  6. 2025VisualCloze: A Universal Image Generation Framework via Visual In-Context Learning
  7. 2025Perception Encoder: The best visual embeddings are not at the output of the network
  8. 2024Diff-2-in-1: Bridging Generation and Dense Perception with Diffusion Models