FlowTok: Flowing Seamlessly Across Text and Image Tokens

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: He, Ju, Yu, Qihang, Liu, Qihao, Chen, Liang-Chieh
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author He, Ju
Yu, Qihang
Liu, Qihao
Chen, Liang-Chieh
author_facet He, Ju
Yu, Qihang
Liu, Qihao
Chen, Liang-Chieh
contents Bridging different modalities lies at the heart of cross-modality generation. While conventional approaches treat the text modality as a conditioning signal that gradually guides the denoising process from Gaussian noise to the target image modality, we explore a much simpler paradigm-directly evolving between text and image modalities through flow matching. This requires projecting both modalities into a shared latent space, which poses a significant challenge due to their inherently different representations: text is highly semantic and encoded as 1D tokens, whereas images are spatially redundant and represented as 2D latent embeddings. To address this, we introduce FlowTok, a minimal framework that seamlessly flows across text and images by encoding images into a compact 1D token representation. Compared to prior methods, this design reduces the latent space size by 3.3x at an image resolution of 256, eliminating the need for complex conditioning mechanisms or noise scheduling. Moreover, FlowTok naturally extends to image-to-text generation under the same formulation. With its streamlined architecture centered around compact 1D tokens, FlowTok is highly memory-efficient, requires significantly fewer training resources, and achieves much faster sampling speeds-all while delivering performance comparable to state-of-the-art models. Code is available at https://github.com/TACJu/FlowTok.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10772
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FlowTok: Flowing Seamlessly Across Text and Image Tokens
He, Ju
Yu, Qihang
Liu, Qihao
Chen, Liang-Chieh
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Bridging different modalities lies at the heart of cross-modality generation. While conventional approaches treat the text modality as a conditioning signal that gradually guides the denoising process from Gaussian noise to the target image modality, we explore a much simpler paradigm-directly evolving between text and image modalities through flow matching. This requires projecting both modalities into a shared latent space, which poses a significant challenge due to their inherently different representations: text is highly semantic and encoded as 1D tokens, whereas images are spatially redundant and represented as 2D latent embeddings. To address this, we introduce FlowTok, a minimal framework that seamlessly flows across text and images by encoding images into a compact 1D token representation. Compared to prior methods, this design reduces the latent space size by 3.3x at an image resolution of 256, eliminating the need for complex conditioning mechanisms or noise scheduling. Moreover, FlowTok naturally extends to image-to-text generation under the same formulation. With its streamlined architecture centered around compact 1D tokens, FlowTok is highly memory-efficient, requires significantly fewer training resources, and achieves much faster sampling speeds-all while delivering performance comparable to state-of-the-art models. Code is available at https://github.com/TACJu/FlowTok.
title FlowTok: Flowing Seamlessly Across Text and Image Tokens
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10772