Back to AI/ML & Deep Learning
Curated
Interview series
Generative AI & Multimodal Models
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Generative Models: Diffusion vs Autoregressive

TechnicalHard~30 minDesigned by experts

About this interview

A technical interview on Generative AI & Multimodal Models, pitched at the hard level. A voice AI interviewer leads the conversation, adapts its questions to your answers, keeps you on topic, and afterward gives you honest, specific feedback on where you were strong and where to improve. Expect roughly 30 minutes.

What you'll be assessed on

Explain denoising diffusion models at a conceptual level: forward noising, reverse denoising, score matching
Compare autoregressive and diffusion generation paradigms across modalities including speed and quality tradeoffs
Describe flow matching as a faster alternative to DDPM-style diffusion
Discuss VAEs and VQ-VAE as image tokenizers enabling autoregressive image generation

Topics covered

Generative model foundationsAutoregressive generationVAEsVQ-VAEVQ-VAE as image tokenizerDiffusion — forward processDiffusion — reverse processScore matchingAR vs Diffusion comparisonDiffusion — fast samplersLatent diffusionClassifier-free guidanceDiT architectureFlow matching

A few sample questions

Just examples to set expectations - the real interview has many more and adapts to your responses.

At a high level, what is the goal of a generative model, and how does it differ from a discriminative model?
What is classifier-free guidance in diffusion models? How does it allow you to trade off sample quality against diversity?
How do you evaluate the quality and diversity of samples from a generative image model? Describe FID, Inception Score, and their limitations.

Related interviews

Junior
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Bias-Variance Tradeoff & Regularization

Technical·~30 min
Junior
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Supervised Learning Algorithms

Technical·~30 min
Mid
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Tree-Based & Ensemble Methods

Technical·~30 min
Mid
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Unsupervised Learning & Dimensionality Reduction

Technical·~30 min
Mid
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Computer Vision: Detection, Segmentation & Beyond Classification

Technical·~30 min
Mid
AI/ML & Deep Learning

CNN Architecture & Computer Vision Fundamentals

Technical·~30 min
Senior
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Deep Generative Models: GANs & VAEs

Technical·~30 min
Mid
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Feature Engineering & Data Preparation

Technical·~30 min
Senior
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Vision-Language Models & Multimodal AI

Technical·~30 min
Senior
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Graph Neural Networks

Technical·~30 min
Mid
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Decoding Strategies & In-Context Learning

Technical·~30 min
Junior
AI/ML & Deep Learning

Linear Algebra & Mathematical Foundations for ML

Technical·~30 min