FastVAR: Linear Visual Autoregressive Modeling via Cached Token Pruning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Guo, Hang, Li, Yawei, Zhang, Taolin, Wang, Jiangshan, Dai, Tao, Xia, Shu-Tao, Benini, Luca
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Guo, Hang
Li, Yawei
Zhang, Taolin
Wang, Jiangshan
Dai, Tao
Xia, Shu-Tao
Benini, Luca
author_facet Guo, Hang
Li, Yawei
Zhang, Taolin
Wang, Jiangshan
Dai, Tao
Xia, Shu-Tao
Benini, Luca
contents Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling has gained popularity for its shift towards next-scale prediction. However, existing VAR paradigms process the entire token map at each scale step, leading to the complexity and runtime scaling dramatically with image resolution. To address this challenge, we propose FastVAR, a post-training acceleration method for efficient resolution scaling with VARs. Our key finding is that the majority of latency arises from the large-scale step where most tokens have already converged. Leveraging this observation, we develop the cached token pruning strategy that only forwards pivotal tokens for scale-specific modeling while using cached tokens from previous scale steps to restore the pruned slots. This significantly reduces the number of forwarded tokens and improves the efficiency at larger resolutions. Experiments show the proposed FastVAR can further speedup FlashAttention-accelerated VAR by 2.7$\times$ with negligible performance drop of <1%. We further extend FastVAR to zero-shot generation of higher resolution images. In particular, FastVAR can generate one 2K image with 15GB memory footprints in 1.5s on a single NVIDIA 3090 GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/csguoh/FastVAR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FastVAR: Linear Visual Autoregressive Modeling via Cached Token Pruning
Guo, Hang
Li, Yawei
Zhang, Taolin
Wang, Jiangshan
Dai, Tao
Xia, Shu-Tao
Benini, Luca
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling has gained popularity for its shift towards next-scale prediction. However, existing VAR paradigms process the entire token map at each scale step, leading to the complexity and runtime scaling dramatically with image resolution. To address this challenge, we propose FastVAR, a post-training acceleration method for efficient resolution scaling with VARs. Our key finding is that the majority of latency arises from the large-scale step where most tokens have already converged. Leveraging this observation, we develop the cached token pruning strategy that only forwards pivotal tokens for scale-specific modeling while using cached tokens from previous scale steps to restore the pruned slots. This significantly reduces the number of forwarded tokens and improves the efficiency at larger resolutions. Experiments show the proposed FastVAR can further speedup FlashAttention-accelerated VAR by 2.7$\times$ with negligible performance drop of <1%. We further extend FastVAR to zero-shot generation of higher resolution images. In particular, FastVAR can generate one 2K image with 15GB memory footprints in 1.5s on a single NVIDIA 3090 GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/csguoh/FastVAR.
title FastVAR: Linear Visual Autoregressive Modeling via Cached Token Pruning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23367