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Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.
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- 2024
SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos
arXiv
SAM 2 is a Meta FAIR foundation model that segments objects in images and videos from simple prompts such as points, boxes or masks, released together with a large video segmentation dataset and training code.
- 2023
Segment Anything
arXiv 2304.02643
A 2023 paper that introduces the Segment Anything project: a promptable segmentation task, a model, and a dataset of over 1 billion masks on 11 million images, all released to advance foundation models for computer vision.
- 2022
Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers (DiT)
arXiv
A 2022 paper by William Peebles and Saining Xie that replaces the U-Net backbone of diffusion models with a transformer operating on latent patches, showing that image quality improves predictably as compute grows and reaching a state-of-the-art FID of 2.27 on ImageNet 256×256.
- 2022
Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding (Imagen)
arXiv
Imagen is a text-to-image diffusion model that uses a large pretrained language model to encode prompts; it reached a zero-shot FID of 7.27 on COCO and introduced the DrawBench benchmark.
- 2021
High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
arXiv 2112.10752 (CVPR 2022)
A 2021 paper by Rombach, Blattmann, Lorenz, Esser and Ommer that runs diffusion models inside the latent space of pretrained autoencoders, cutting the compute needed for high-resolution image synthesis while adding cross-attention for text and bounding-box control.
- 2021
Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation (DALL·E)
arXiv
A 2021 OpenAI paper describing a single 12-billion-parameter autoregressive transformer trained on 250 million image-text pairs, which generates images from text and, evaluated zero-shot, is competitive with domain-specific models.
- 2021
Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision (CLIP)
ICML
CLIP is an OpenAI model trained on 400 million image-text pairs to map pictures and sentences into one shared space, so it can classify images zero-shot from a written description.
- 2020
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale (ViT)
arXiv
A 2020 paper showing that a plain Transformer applied directly to sequences of image patches, with no convolution at all, can match state-of-the-art convolutional networks on image classification.
- 2020
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale
arXiv 2010.11929 (ICLR 2021)
A 2020 paper by Alexey Dosovitskiy and colleagues showing that a pure Transformer applied directly to sequences of image patches — the Vision Transformer, or ViT — matches state-of-the-art convolutional networks on image classification when pre-trained on large amounts of data.
- 2020
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
NeurIPS
A 2020 paper by Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain and Pieter Abbeel that trained a U-Net to reverse a gradual noising process, making diffusion models a practical rival to GANs and paving the way for DALL-E 2, Imagen and Stable Diffusion.
- 2020
NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis
arXiv
A 2020 paper by Mildenhall, Srinivasan, Tancik, Barron, Ramamoorthi and Ng that represents a scene as a neural radiance field: a network mapping 5D coordinates to density and colour, optimized from a sparse set of images with known camera poses.
- 2018
A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks
arXiv
This 2018 paper introduces a style-based GAN generator that separates high-level attributes from stochastic variation and allows scale-specific control, improving distribution quality, interpolation, and disentanglement.
- 2018
Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis
arXiv
A 2018 paper by Andrew Brock, Jeff Donahue and Karen Simonyan that trained generative adversarial networks at the largest scale attempted at the time, introduced BigGANs and set a new state of the art in class-conditional image synthesis.
- 2018
Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions
arXiv
A 2018 paper by Diederik P. Kingma and Prafulla Dhariwal presenting Glow, a flow-based generative model built on invertible 1x1 convolutions, which improved log-likelihood on standard benchmarks and could synthesise and manipulate large images.
- 2017
Neural Discrete Representation Learning
arXiv
A 2017 paper by van den Oord, Vinyals and Kavukcuoglu proposing VQ-VAE, a generative model whose latent code is discrete rather than continuous, and whose prior is learned rather than fixed, so that useful representations can be learned without supervision.
- 2017
Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation
arXiv
A 2017 paper by Karras, Aila, Laine and Lehtinen that trains generative adversarial networks by growing the generator and discriminator from low to high resolution, improving stability, quality and variation.
- 2017
Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection
arXiv
A 2017 paper by Lin, Goyal, Girshick, He and Dollar that argues dense one-stage detectors are held back by extreme foreground-background imbalance and proposes focal loss, a reshaped cross-entropy that down-weights well-classified examples.
- 2017
Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks
arXiv
CycleGAN learns image-to-image translation between two domains without aligned pairs, combining an adversarial loss with a cycle-consistency constraint to constrain the mapping.
- 2017
Mask R-CNN
arXiv
Mask R-CNN is a 2017 framework for object instance segmentation. It detects objects and produces a high-quality mask for each instance by adding a parallel mask branch to Faster R-CNN.
- 2016
WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio
arXiv
WaveNet is a deep neural network that generates raw audio waveforms one sample at a time, predicting each sample from all the ones before it. Used for text-to-speech, it was rated by listeners as more natural than the systems it was compared with.