# CoD: A Diffusion Foundation Model for Image Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18706 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18706/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 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 46 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 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 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [Finite Scalar Quantization: VQ-VAE Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15505/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06950/) (2022)
- [DDT: Decoupled Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05741/) (2025)
- [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)
- [PixNerd: Pixel Neural Field Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23268/) (2025)
- [Multi-Realism Image Compression with a Conditional Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13824/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [CoD-Lite: Real-Time Diffusion-Based Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12525/) (2026)
- [GVCC: Zero-Shot Video Compression via Codebook-Driven Stochastic Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26571/) (2026)
- [Generative Video Compression with One-Dimensional Latent Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15302/) (2026)
- [Generative Video Compression with Adaptive Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22772/) (2026)
- [UniFluids: Unified Neural Operator Learning with Conditional Flow-matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22309/) (2026)
- [FlowCodec: One-Step Flow Prior for Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21030/) (2026)
- [CodecArena: Codec Quality Assessment via Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09139/) (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)
- [Recasting DiT for Extreme Image Compression with Hierarchical Visual Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18607/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing diffusion codecs typically build on text-to-image diffusion foundation models like Stable Diffusion. However, text conditioning is suboptimal from a compression perspective, hindering the potential of downstream diffusion codecs, particularly at ultra-low bitrates. To address it, we introduce CoD, the first Compression-oriented Diffusion foundation model, trained from scratch to enable end-to-end optimization of both compression and generation. CoD is not a fixed codec but a general foundation model designed for various diffusion-based codecs. It offers several advantages: High compression efficiency, replacing Stable Diffusion with CoD in downstream codecs like DiffC achieves SOTA results, especially at ultra-low bitrates (e.g., 0.0039 bpp); Low-cost and reproducible training, 300× faster training than Stable Diffusion (~ 20 vs. ~ 6,250 A100 GPU days) on entirely open image-only datasets; Providing new insights, e.g., We find pixel-space diffusion can achieve VTM-level PSNR with high perceptual quality and can outperform GAN-based codecs using fewer parameters. We hope CoD lays the foundation for future diffusion codec research. Codes are released at https://github.com/microsoft/GenCodec/tree/main/CoD.