MVAR: Visual Autoregressive Modeling with Scale and Spatial Markovian Conditioning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Jinhua, Long, Wei, Han, Minghao, You, Weiyi, Gu, Shuhang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917239907680256
author Zhang, Jinhua
Long, Wei
Han, Minghao
You, Weiyi
Gu, Shuhang
author_facet Zhang, Jinhua
Long, Wei
Han, Minghao
You, Weiyi
Gu, Shuhang
contents Essential to visual generation is efficient modeling of visual data priors. Conventional next-token prediction methods define the process as learning the conditional probability distribution of successive tokens. Recently, next-scale prediction methods redefine the process to learn the distribution over multi-scale representations, significantly reducing generation latency. However, these methods condition each scale on all previous scales and require each token to consider all preceding tokens, exhibiting scale and spatial redundancy. To better model the distribution by mitigating redundancy, we propose Markovian Visual AutoRegressive modeling (MVAR), a novel autoregressive framework that introduces scale and spatial Markov assumptions to reduce the complexity of conditional probability modeling. Specifically, we introduce a scale-Markov trajectory that only takes as input the features of adjacent preceding scale for next-scale prediction, enabling the adoption of a parallel training strategy that significantly reduces GPU memory consumption. Furthermore, we propose spatial-Markov attention, which restricts the attention of each token to a localized neighborhood of size k at corresponding positions on adjacent scales, rather than attending to every token across these scales, for the pursuit of reduced modeling complexity. Building on these improvements, we reduce the computational complexity of attention calculation from O(N^2) to O(Nk), enabling training with just eight NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPUs and eliminating the need for KV cache during inference. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that MVAR achieves comparable or superior performance with both small model trained from scratch and large fine-tuned models, while reducing the average GPU memory footprint by 3.0x.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12742
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MVAR: Visual Autoregressive Modeling with Scale and Spatial Markovian Conditioning
Zhang, Jinhua
Long, Wei
Han, Minghao
You, Weiyi
Gu, Shuhang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Essential to visual generation is efficient modeling of visual data priors. Conventional next-token prediction methods define the process as learning the conditional probability distribution of successive tokens. Recently, next-scale prediction methods redefine the process to learn the distribution over multi-scale representations, significantly reducing generation latency. However, these methods condition each scale on all previous scales and require each token to consider all preceding tokens, exhibiting scale and spatial redundancy. To better model the distribution by mitigating redundancy, we propose Markovian Visual AutoRegressive modeling (MVAR), a novel autoregressive framework that introduces scale and spatial Markov assumptions to reduce the complexity of conditional probability modeling. Specifically, we introduce a scale-Markov trajectory that only takes as input the features of adjacent preceding scale for next-scale prediction, enabling the adoption of a parallel training strategy that significantly reduces GPU memory consumption. Furthermore, we propose spatial-Markov attention, which restricts the attention of each token to a localized neighborhood of size k at corresponding positions on adjacent scales, rather than attending to every token across these scales, for the pursuit of reduced modeling complexity. Building on these improvements, we reduce the computational complexity of attention calculation from O(N^2) to O(Nk), enabling training with just eight NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPUs and eliminating the need for KV cache during inference. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that MVAR achieves comparable or superior performance with both small model trained from scratch and large fine-tuned models, while reducing the average GPU memory footprint by 3.0x.
title MVAR: Visual Autoregressive Modeling with Scale and Spatial Markovian Conditioning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12742