Abstract In this paper we revisit diffusion processes on affifinity graphs for capturing the intrinsic manifold structure de- fifined by pairwise affifinity matrices. Such diffusion processes have already proved the ability to signifificantly improve subsequent applications like retrieval. We give a thorough overview of the state-of-the-art in this fifield and discuss obvious similarities and differences. Based on our observations, we are then able to derive a generic framework for diffusion processes in the scope of retrieval applications, where the related work represents specifific instances of our generic formulation. We evaluate our framework on several retrieval tasks and are able to derive algorithms that e. g. achieve a 100% bullseye score on the popular MPEG7 shape retrieval data set