Papers › Masked Diffusion as Self-supervised Representation Learner

Masked Diffusion as Self-supervised Representation Learner

10 Aug 2023arXiv:2308.05695archive 2025-07-28

Zixuan Pan, Jianxu Chen, Yiyu Shi

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art generative performance and have been used as strong pixel-level representation learners. This paper decomposes the interrelation between the generative capability and representation learning ability inherent in diffusion models. We present the masked diffusion model (MDM), a scalable self-supervised representation learner for semantic segmentation, substituting the conventional additive Gaussian noise of traditional diffusion with a masking mechanism. Our proposed approach convincingly surpasses prior benchmarks, demonstrating remarkable advancements in both medical and natural image semantic segmentation tasks, particularly in few-shot scenarios.

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Code

zx-pan/mdm officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

DenoisingMedical Image SegmentationRepresentation LearningSegmentationSemantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Medical Image Segmentation GlaS MDM Dice 91.95 #2 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Medical Image Segmentation GlaS MDM F1 91.95 #2 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Medical Image Segmentation GlaS MDM IoU 85.13 #2 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Medical Image Segmentation MoNuSeg MDM F1 81.01 #5 of 15 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Diffusion

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