Forward noising chain and reverse denoising chain with a U-Net at each step.
For generative-AI papers introducing diffusion variants (DDPM, DDIM, score-based, latent diffusion).
Same flow but operate in latent space. Add a VAE encoder mapping image -> latent at the start and a VAE decoder mapping denoised latent -> image at the end. The diffusion process happens entirely in the latent domain.