Received (Day Month Year) Revised (Day Month Year) Communicated by (xxxxxxxxxx)We prove the existence of global-in-time weak solutions to a general class of models that arise from the kinetic theory of dilute solutions of nonhomogeneous polymeric liquids, where the polymer molecules are idealized as bead-spring chains with finitely extensible nonlinear elastic (FENE) type spring potentials. The class of models under consideration involves the unsteady, compressible, isentropic, isothermal Navier-Stokes system in a bounded domain Ω in R d , d = 2 or 3, for the density ρ, the velocity u ∼ and the pressure p of the fluid, with an equation of state of the form p(ρ) = cpρ γ , where cp is a positive constant and γ > 3 2. The right-hand side of the Navier-Stokes momentum equation includes an elastic extra-stress tensor, which is the sum of the classical Kramers expression and a quadratic interaction term. The elastic extra-stress tensor stems from the random movement of the polymer chains and is defined through the associated probability density function that satisfies a Fokker-Planck-type parabolic equation, a crucial feature of which is the presence of a centre-of-mass diffusion term.