FlexVAR: Flexible Visual Autoregressive Modeling without Residual Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jiao, Siyu, Zhang, Gengwei, Qian, Yinlong, Huang, Jiancheng, Zhao, Yao, Shi, Humphrey, Ma, Lin, Wei, Yunchao, Jie, Zequn
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jiao, Siyu
Zhang, Gengwei
Qian, Yinlong
Huang, Jiancheng
Zhao, Yao
Shi, Humphrey
Ma, Lin
Wei, Yunchao
Jie, Zequn
author_facet Jiao, Siyu
Zhang, Gengwei
Qian, Yinlong
Huang, Jiancheng
Zhao, Yao
Shi, Humphrey
Ma, Lin
Wei, Yunchao
Jie, Zequn
contents This work challenges the residual prediction paradigm in visual autoregressive modeling and presents FlexVAR, a new Flexible Visual AutoRegressive image generation paradigm. FlexVAR facilitates autoregressive learning with ground-truth prediction, enabling each step to independently produce plausible images. This simple, intuitive approach swiftly learns visual distributions and makes the generation process more flexible and adaptable. Trained solely on low-resolution images ($\leq$ 256px), FlexVAR can: (1) Generate images of various resolutions and aspect ratios, even exceeding the resolution of the training images. (2) Support various image-to-image tasks, including image refinement, in/out-painting, and image expansion. (3) Adapt to various autoregressive steps, allowing for faster inference with fewer steps or enhancing image quality with more steps. Our 1.0B model outperforms its VAR counterpart on the ImageNet 256$\times$256 benchmark. Moreover, when zero-shot transfer the image generation process with 13 steps, the performance further improves to 2.08 FID, outperforming state-of-the-art autoregressive models AiM/VAR by 0.25/0.28 FID and popular diffusion models LDM/DiT by 1.52/0.19 FID, respectively. When transferring our 1.0B model to the ImageNet 512$\times$512 benchmark in a zero-shot manner, FlexVAR achieves competitive results compared to the VAR 2.3B model, which is a fully supervised model trained at 512$\times$512 resolution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_20313
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FlexVAR: Flexible Visual Autoregressive Modeling without Residual Prediction
Jiao, Siyu
Zhang, Gengwei
Qian, Yinlong
Huang, Jiancheng
Zhao, Yao
Shi, Humphrey
Ma, Lin
Wei, Yunchao
Jie, Zequn
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
This work challenges the residual prediction paradigm in visual autoregressive modeling and presents FlexVAR, a new Flexible Visual AutoRegressive image generation paradigm. FlexVAR facilitates autoregressive learning with ground-truth prediction, enabling each step to independently produce plausible images. This simple, intuitive approach swiftly learns visual distributions and makes the generation process more flexible and adaptable. Trained solely on low-resolution images ($\leq$ 256px), FlexVAR can: (1) Generate images of various resolutions and aspect ratios, even exceeding the resolution of the training images. (2) Support various image-to-image tasks, including image refinement, in/out-painting, and image expansion. (3) Adapt to various autoregressive steps, allowing for faster inference with fewer steps or enhancing image quality with more steps. Our 1.0B model outperforms its VAR counterpart on the ImageNet 256$\times$256 benchmark. Moreover, when zero-shot transfer the image generation process with 13 steps, the performance further improves to 2.08 FID, outperforming state-of-the-art autoregressive models AiM/VAR by 0.25/0.28 FID and popular diffusion models LDM/DiT by 1.52/0.19 FID, respectively. When transferring our 1.0B model to the ImageNet 512$\times$512 benchmark in a zero-shot manner, FlexVAR achieves competitive results compared to the VAR 2.3B model, which is a fully supervised model trained at 512$\times$512 resolution.
title FlexVAR: Flexible Visual Autoregressive Modeling without Residual Prediction
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20313