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FlexTok: Resampling Images into 1D Token Sequences of Flexible Length

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arxiv 2502.13967 v2 pith:R5UPIOTR submitted 2025-02-19 cs.CV cs.LG

FlexTok: Resampling Images into 1D Token Sequences of Flexible Length

classification cs.CV cs.LG
keywords flextokgenerationimagetokenstokenizationimagesmethodstoken
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Image tokenization has enabled major advances in autoregressive image generation by providing compressed, discrete representations that are more efficient to process than raw pixels. While traditional approaches use 2D grid tokenization, recent methods like TiTok have shown that 1D tokenization can achieve high generation quality by eliminating grid redundancies. However, these methods typically use a fixed number of tokens and thus cannot adapt to an image's inherent complexity. We introduce FlexTok, a tokenizer that projects 2D images into variable-length, ordered 1D token sequences. For example, a 256x256 image can be resampled into anywhere from 1 to 256 discrete tokens, hierarchically and semantically compressing its information. By training a rectified flow model as the decoder and using nested dropout, FlexTok produces plausible reconstructions regardless of the chosen token sequence length. We evaluate our approach in an autoregressive generation setting using a simple GPT-style Transformer. On ImageNet, this approach achieves an FID<2 across 8 to 128 tokens, outperforming TiTok and matching state-of-the-art methods with far fewer tokens. We further extend the model to support to text-conditioned image generation and examine how FlexTok relates to traditional 2D tokenization. A key finding is that FlexTok enables next-token prediction to describe images in a coarse-to-fine "visual vocabulary", and that the number of tokens to generate depends on the complexity of the generation task.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. AdaTok: Self-Budgeting Image Tokenization with Quality-Preserving Dynamic Tokens

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    AdaTok learns content-dependent token budgets for discrete 1D image tokenization via prioritized representation learning and a GRPO allocation policy, achieving rFID 1.50 at ~118 tokens average versus fixed 256-token ...

  2. ChannelTok: Efficient Flexible-Length Vision Tokenization

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    ChannelTok introduces channel-wise tokenization with stochastic tail-dropping to achieve rFID 2.92 on ImageNet at 8.6x faster decoding and 2.1x smaller size than prior flexible tokenizers.

  3. Structure over Pixels: Learning Variable-Length Visual Programs

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    STROP learns variable-length discrete visual programs for images by training a length head against frozen DINOv3 features in a four-phase curriculum while bypassing pixel reconstruction.

  4. Vision Foundation Models as Generalist Tokenizers for Image Generation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    VFMTok builds a generalist image tokenizer on frozen VFMs using adaptive quantization and semantic alignment, delivering gFID 1.36 for autoregressive and 1.25 for continuous generation on ImageNet with 3x faster convergence.

  5. ELT: Elastic Looped Transformers for Visual Generation

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Elastic Looped Transformers share weights across recurrent blocks and apply intra-loop self-distillation to deliver 4x parameter reduction while matching competitive FID and FVD scores on ImageNet and UCF-101.

  6. ELT: Elastic Looped Transformers for Visual Generation

    cs.CV 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    Weight-shared looped transformers trained with intra-loop self-distillation match MaskGIT-class FID/FVD at roughly 4x fewer parameters and support any-time inference across loop counts.