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    2026 edition · Top 30

    Generative models

    Models that learn to produce data: VAEs, GANs, flows, diffusion and autoregressive models.

    Generative models: 30 · N = 30, scaled from 81 candidates.

    0 of 30 of this page's 30 read · saved in this browser only

    1. 1
      Generative models2013 · published 2014

      Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes

      Diederik P. Kingma · 20,065 citations · OpenAlex

      AwardEditor's note
    2. 2
      Generative models2015 · published 2016

      Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks

      Alec Radford · 15,333 citations · Papers With Code

      Award
    3. 3
      Generative models2020

      Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

      Jonathan Ho · 36,409 citations · Papers With Code

      Editor's note
    4. 4
      Generative models2014

      Generative Adversarial Nets

      Ian Goodfellow · 4,477 citations · OpenAlex

      AwardEditor's note
    5. 5
      Generative models2021 · published 2022

      High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models

      Robin Rombach · 28,168 citations · Papers With Code

      Editor's note
    6. 6
      Generative models2020 · published 2021

      Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations

      Yang Song · 12,556 citations · Papers With Code

      Editor's note
    7. 7
      Generative models2018 · published 2019

      A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks

      Tero Karras · 13,711 citations · Papers With Code

    8. 8
      Generative models2022 · published 2023

      Flow Matching for Generative Modeling

      Yaron Lipman · 7,003 citations · Papers With Code

      Editor's note
    9. 9
      Generative models2015

      Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics

      Jascha Sohl-Dickstein · 10,963 citations · Papers With Code

    10. 10
      Generative models2020 · published 2021

      Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models

      Jiaming Song · 13,950 citations · Papers With Code

    11. 11
      Generative models2022

      Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance

      Jonathan Ho · 7,440 citations · Papers With Code

    12. 12
      Generative models2021

      Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation

      Aditya Ramesh · 6,799 citations · Papers With Code

    13. 13
      Generative models2017

      Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks

      Martin Arjovsky · 6,382 citations · OpenAlex

    14. 14
      Generative models2015

      Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows

      Danilo Jimenez Rezende · 5,182 citations · Papers With Code

      Award
    15. 15
      Generative models2016

      Improved Techniques for Training GANs

      Salimans · 10,762 citations · Papers With Code

    16. 16
      Generative models2022

      Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers

      William Peebles · 7,698 citations · Papers With Code

    17. 17
      Generative models2017 · published 2018

      Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation

      Tero Karras · 8,843 citations · Papers With Code

    18. 18
      Generative models1985

      A learning algorithm for Boltzmann machines

      David H. Ackley · 3,405 citations · OpenAlex

      Editor's note
    19. 19
      Generative models2022

      Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding

      Chitwan Saharia · 9,031 citations · Papers With Code

    20. 20
      Generative models2021

      Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis

      Prafulla Dhariwal · 13,342 citations · Papers With Code

    21. 21
      Generative models2022

      Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents

      Ramesh · 9,532 citations · Papers With Code

    22. 22
      Generative models2017

      Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks

      Jun-Yan Zhu · 23,599 citations · OpenAlex

    23. 23
      Generative models2016 · published 2017

      Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks

      Phillip Isola · 23,314 citations · Papers With Code

    24. 24
      Generative models2019

      Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution

      Yang Song · 6,113 citations · Papers With Code

    25. 25
      Generative models2019 · published 2020

      Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN

      Tero Karras · 7,281 citations · Papers With Code

    26. 26
      Generative models2017

      Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs

      Ishaan Gulrajani · 11,321 citations · Papers With Code

    27. 27
      Generative models2018

      Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

      Ricky T. Q. Chen · 7,965 citations · Papers With Code

    28. 28
      Generative models2023

      Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

      Lvmin Zhang · 8,002 citations · Papers With Code

    29. 29
      Generative models2018 · published 2019

      Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis

      Andrew Brock · 6,324 citations · Papers With Code

    30. 30
      Generative models2016 · published 2017

      Density estimation using Real NVP

      Laurent Dinh · 4,671 citations · Papers With Code

    Ranked on another page

    Also relevant

    Top 500 papers ranked on another domain page that matter here too.

    1. Language, speech & LLMs2016

      WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio

      Aäron van den Oord · 8,473 citations · Papers With Code

      Editor's note
    2. Deep learning2006

      A Fast Learning Algorithm for Deep Belief Nets

      Geoffrey E. Hinton · 16,335 citations · OpenAlex

      Editor's note

    Data sources

    Catalogue data from OpenAlex (CC0), Crossref (CC0 metadata; no abstracts are shown), arXiv, and Papers With Code (CC BY-SA 4.0). Each count names its source. See the method.