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An Image Is Worth 32 Tokens for Reconstruction and Generation [pdf] (arxiv.org)
3 points by croes on Jun 17, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of slicing an image into a grid of patches, this tokenizer squeezes it into a short line of 32 codes that a generator rebuilds into the picture. It matched the best generators with 64 times fewer tokens and far faster image creation.

Abstract · An Image is Worth 32 Tokens for Reconstruction and Generation

Recent advancements in generative models have highlighted the crucial role of image tokenization in the efficient synthesis of high-resolution images. Tokenization, which transforms images into latent representations, reduces computational demands compared to directly processing pixels and enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of the generation process. Prior methods, such as VQGAN, typically utilize 2D latent grids with fixed downsampling factors. However, these 2D tokenizations face challenges in managing the inherent redundancies present in images, where adjacent regions frequently display similarities. To overcome this issue, we introduce Transformer-based 1-Dimensional Tokenizer (TiTok), an innovative approach that tokenizes images into 1D latent sequences. TiTok provides a more compact latent representation, yielding substantially more efficient and effective representations than conventional techniques. For example, a 256 x 256 x 3 image can be reduced to just 32 discrete tokens, a significant reduction from the 256 or 1024 tokens obtained by prior methods. Despite its compact nature, TiTok achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, using the same generator framework, TiTok attains 1.97 gFID, outperforming MaskGIT baseline significantly by 4.21 at ImageNet 256 x 256 benchmark. The advantages of TiTok become even more significant when it comes to higher resolution. At ImageNet 512 x 512 benchmark, TiTok not only outperforms state-of-the-art diffusion model DiT-XL/2 (gFID 2.74 vs. 3.04), but also reduces the image tokens by 64x, leading to 410x faster generation process. Our best-performing variant can significantly surpasses DiT-XL/2 (gFID 2.13 vs. 3.04) while still generating high-quality samples 74x faster.

Qihang Yu, Mark Weber, Xueqing Deng, Xiaohui Shen, Daniel Cremers, Liang-Chieh Chen
arXiv:2406.07550 · cs.CV · submitted Jun 11, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · A compact 1D Image Tokenization method, leading to SOTA generation performance while being substantially faster. Project page at https://yucornetto.github.io/projects/titok.html

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