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Fractal Generative Models (arxiv.org)
2 points by lnyan on Feb 26, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Generative models are built by nesting one tiny generator inside itself over and over, creating a self-similar, fractal-like design. Tested on drawing images one pixel at a time, it scored well on both how likely its images were and how good they looked.

Abstract

Modularization is a cornerstone of computer science, abstracting complex functions into atomic building blocks. In this paper, we introduce a new level of modularization by abstracting generative models into atomic generative modules. Analogous to fractals in mathematics, our method constructs a new type of generative model by recursively invoking atomic generative modules, resulting in self-similar fractal architectures that we call fractal generative models. As a running example, we instantiate our fractal framework using autoregressive models as the atomic generative modules and examine it on the challenging task of pixel-by-pixel image generation, demonstrating strong performance in both likelihood estimation and generation quality. We hope this work could open a new paradigm in generative modeling and provide a fertile ground for future research. Code is available at https://github.com/LTH14/fractalgen.

Tianhong Li, Qinyi Sun, Lijie Fan, Kaiming He
arXiv:2502.17437 · cs.LG, cs.CV · submitted Feb 24, 2025 · updated Feb 25, 2025
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