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Dart: Denoising Autoregressive Transformer (arxiv.org)
1 point by E-Reverance 18 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A language-model-style image generator builds pictures by cleaning up noise patch by patch, instead of the usual diffusion process that adds and removes noise gradually. It nearly matches top diffusion models on image generation without turning images into a fixed set of codes.

Abstract · DART: Denoising Autoregressive Transformer for Scalable Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion models have become the dominant approach for visual generation. They are trained by denoising a Markovian process which gradually adds noise to the input. We argue that the Markovian property limits the model's ability to fully utilize the generation trajectory, leading to inefficiencies during training and inference. In this paper, we propose DART, a transformer-based model that unifies autoregressive (AR) and diffusion within a non-Markovian framework. DART iteratively denoises image patches spatially and spectrally using an AR model that has the same architecture as standard language models. DART does not rely on image quantization, which enables more effective image modeling while maintaining flexibility. Furthermore, DART seamlessly trains with both text and image data in a unified model. Our approach demonstrates competitive performance on class-conditioned and text-to-image generation tasks, offering a scalable, efficient alternative to traditional diffusion models. Through this unified framework, DART sets a new benchmark for scalable, high-quality image synthesis.

Jiatao Gu, Yuyang Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Qihang Zhang, Dinghuai Zhang, Navdeep Jaitly, Josh Susskind, Shuangfei Zhai
arXiv:2410.08159 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Oct 10, 2024 · updated Jan 23, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted by ICLR2025

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