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arXiv · 2602.15030

Image Generation with a Sphere Encoder

Kaiyu Yue·Menglin Jia·Ji Hou·Tom Goldstein
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Abstract

We introduce the Sphere Encoder, an efficient generative framework capable of producing images in a single forward pass and competing with many-step diffusion models using fewer than five steps. Our approach works by learning an encoder that maps natural images uniformly onto a spherical latent space, and a decoder that maps random latent vectors back to the image space. Trained solely through image reconstruction losses, the model generates an image by simply decoding a random point on the sphere. Our architecture naturally supports conditional generation, and looping the encoder/decoder a few times can further enhance image quality. Across several datasets, the sphere encoder approach yields performance competitive with state of the art diffusions, but with a small fraction of the inference cost. Project page is available at https://sphere-encoder.github.io .

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Kaiyu Yue, Menglin Jia, Ji Hou, Tom Goldstein. 2026-02-16. Image Generation with a Sphere Encoder. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15030

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