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MaskBit: Embedding-free Image Generation via Bit Tokens

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arxiv 2409.16211 v2 pith:DDJEWDMG submitted 2024-09-24 cs.CV cs.LG

MaskBit: Embedding-free Image Generation via Bit Tokens

classification cs.CV cs.LG
keywords imagegenerationmodeltokensembedding-freespacevqgancontribution
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Masked transformer models for class-conditional image generation have become a compelling alternative to diffusion models. Typically comprising two stages - an initial VQGAN model for transitioning between latent space and image space, and a subsequent Transformer model for image generation within latent space - these frameworks offer promising avenues for image synthesis. In this study, we present two primary contributions: Firstly, an empirical and systematic examination of VQGANs, leading to a modernized VQGAN. Secondly, a novel embedding-free generation network operating directly on bit tokens - a binary quantized representation of tokens with rich semantics. The first contribution furnishes a transparent, reproducible, and high-performing VQGAN model, enhancing accessibility and matching the performance of current state-of-the-art methods while revealing previously undisclosed details. The second contribution demonstrates that embedding-free image generation using bit tokens achieves a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.52 on the ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, with a compact generator model of mere 305M parameters. The code for this project is available on https://github.com/markweberdev/maskbit.

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Forward citations

Cited by 12 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  2. Balancing Image Compression and Generation with Bootstrapped Tokenization

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    SelfBootTok decomposes image tokens into global and local groups via self-bootstrapped learning, enabling generators to use only global tokens for ~40% less computation and a new SOTA gFID of 1.56 with 64 tokens.

  3. Distilling Specialized Orders for Visual Generation

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  4. Beyond Token-Level Cross-Entropy: Fr\'echet Distributional Post-Training for Autoregressive Image Generation

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    FD-loss post-training with detached rollout replay and a probability-level straight-through estimator improves FID and FD_r6 across eight ImageNet configurations.

  5. Twins: Learn to Predict Unified Representations with Focal Loss

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    Channel-wise concatenation of SigLIP2 and Flux VAE features into one token, trained with a focal-style flow-matching loss, yields a unified representation with 1.59 gFID on ImageNet 256 and VAE-level reconstruction.

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