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 scalable image generation


Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction

Neural Information Processing Systems

This simple, intuitive methodology allows autoregressive (AR) transformers to learn visual distributions fast and generalize well: VAR, for the first time, makes GPT-style AR models surpass diffusion transformers in image generation. On ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, VAR significantly improve AR baseline by improving Frechet inception distance (FID) from 18.65 to 1.73, inception score (IS) from 80.4 to 350.2, with around 20x faster inference speed. It is also empirically verified that VAR outperforms the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) in multiple dimensions including image quality, inference speed, data efficiency, and scalability. Scaling up VAR models exhibits clear power-law scaling laws similar to those observed in LLMs, with linear correlation coefficients near -0.998 as solid evidence. These results suggest VAR has initially emulated the two important properties of LLMs: Scaling Laws and zero-shot task generalization.