# Region-Adaptive Generative Compression with Spatially Varying Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01122 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01122/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion for compression and wireless, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 37 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.

## 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 37)

- [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)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [Joint Autoregressive and Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02736/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Towards Extreme Image Compression with Latent Feature Guidance and Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18820/) (2024)
- [Variable-Rate Deep Image Compression through Spatially-Adaptive Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09551/) (2021)
- [High-Fidelity Image Compression with Score-based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18231/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models With Learned Adaptive Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13236/) (2023)
- [Iterative α-(de)Blending: a Minimalist Deterministic Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03486/) (2023)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Foundation Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08580/) (2024)
- [A Residual Diffusion Model for High Perceptual Quality Codec Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05489/) (2023)
- [StableCodec: Taming One-Step Diffusion for Extreme Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21977/) (2025)
- [How I Warped Your Noise: a Temporally-Correlated Noise Prior for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03072/) (2025)
- [Learning Content-Weighted Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00664/) (2019)
- [Denoising Diffusion Gamma Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05948/) (2021)
- [Lossy Compression with Pretrained Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09815/) (2025)
- [RDEIC: Accelerating Diffusion-Based Extreme Image Compression with Relay Residual Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02640/) (2024)
- [PerCo (SD): Open Perceptual Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20255/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative image codecs aim to optimize perceptual quality, producing realistic and detailed reconstructions. However, they often overlook a key property of human vision: our tendency to focus on particular aspects of a visual scene (e.g., salient objects) while giving less importance to other regions. An ideal perceptual codec should be able to exploit this property by allocating more representational capacity to perceptually important areas. To this end, we propose a region-adaptive diffusion-based image codec that supports non-uniform bit allocation within an image. We design a novel spatially varying diffusion model capable of denoising varying amounts of noise per pixel according to arbitrary importance maps. We further identify that these maps can serve as effective priors on the latent representation, and integrate them into our entropy model, improving rate-distortion performance. Built on these contributions, our spatially-adaptive diffusion-based codec outperforms state-of-the-art ROI-controllable baselines in both full-image and ROI-masked perceptual quality.