Latent Diffusion Model without Variational Autoencoder

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission4005 Authors

Keywords: generative model, deep learning, self-supervised learning

Abstract: Recent progress in diffusion-based visual generation has largely relied on latent diffusion models with Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). While effective for high-fidelity synthesis, this VAE+Diffusion paradigm suffers from limited training efficiency, slow inference, and poor transferability to broader vision tasks. These issues stem from a key limitation of VAE latent spaces: the lack of clear semantic separation and strong discriminative structure. Our analysis confirms that these properties are not only crucial for perception and understanding tasks, but also equally essential for the stable and efficient training of latent diffusion models. Motivated by this insight, we introduce **SVG**—a novel latent diffusion model without variational autoencoders, which unleashes **S**elf-supervised representations for **V**isual **G**eneration. SVG constructs a feature space with clear semantic discriminability by leveraging frozen DINO features, while a lightweight residual branch captures fine-grained details for high-fidelity reconstruction. Diffusion models are trained directly on this semantically structured latent space to facilitate more efficient learning. As a result, SVG enables accelerated diffusion training, supports few-step sampling, and improves generative quality. Experimental results further show that SVG preserves the semantic and discriminative capabilities of the underlying self-supervised representations, providing a principled pathway toward task-general, high-quality visual representations.

Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 4005