Pixel-Semantic VAE: The AI Breakout Uniting Image Understanding and Creation

Both Semantics and Reconstruction Matter: Making Visual Encoders Ready for Text-to-Image Generation and Editing Why do state-of-the-art vision understanding models struggle with creative tasks like image generation? The answer lies in a fundamental disconnect between recognition and reconstruction. Imagine asking a world-renowned art critic to paint a portrait. They could eloquently dissect the composition, color theory, and emotional impact of any masterpiece, but if handed a brush, their actual painting might be awkward and lack detail. A similar paradox exists in artificial intelligence today. Modern visual understanding systems—powered by representation encoders like DINOv2 and SigLIP—have become foundational to computer vision. …