Tianhua Chen Releases "The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitive Mathematical Primer"

Tianhua Chen has released "The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitive Mathematical Primer" on arXiv, presenting a derivation-oriented overview of the mathematical foundations of generative AI. The book connects PCA, probabilistic PCA, variational autoencoders, diffusion models, normalizing flows, autoregressive decomposition, GANs, Wasserstein GANs, and energy models, and is aimed at researchers, practitioners, and students. The paper was submitted as v1 on May 28, 2026, and updated to v2 on September 8.