Vision & Multimodal Oct 2025 · #79 most cited · 69 citations

The Principles of Diffusion Models

Chieh-Hsin Lai et al.

arXiv:2510.21890

In short

A book-length account of diffusion models that unifies three views: removing noise step by step, following the gradient of the data distribution, and flowing smoothly from noise to data. It then covers guidance, fast samplers and flow-map models.

Why it matters

One coherent mental model for the math behind image, video and diffusion language models.

Read first

The 3 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.

Starting from scratch? The full route 9 ideas · basics first
  1. Machine Learning ✓ understood

    Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.

  2. Neural Network ✓ understood

    A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.

  3. Diffusion Model · read first ✓ understood

    A generative model that learns to denoise data, achieving state-of-the-art image generation (Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2).

  4. Entropy ✓ understood

    A measure of uncertainty or randomness in a random variable from information theory.

  5. KL Divergence ✓ understood

    Kullback-Leibler divergence - a measure of how one probability distribution differs from another.

  6. Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.

  7. Autoencoder ✓ understood

    An unsupervised neural network that learns to compress data into a latent representation and reconstruct it, useful for dimensionality reduction.

  8. Variational Autoencoder · read first ✓ understood

    A generative model that learns a probabilistic latent space, allowing sampling of new data points similar to training data.

  9. Latent Variable · read first ✓ understood

    Hidden or unobserved variables in a model that influence observed data but aren't directly measured.

In the frontier

Rank
#79 of 100
Citations
69
as of Aug 9, 2026
Published
Oct 2025

Topics: Diffusion LMs and decoding , Model architecture , Efficiency and serving

Selection: 1kpapers.com by Together AI, most-cited as of Aug 9, 2026

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