Single-pass Adaptive Image Tokenization for Minimum Program Search

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Duggal, Shivam, Byun, Sanghyun, Freeman, William T., Torralba, Antonio, Isola, Phillip
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Duggal, Shivam
Byun, Sanghyun
Freeman, William T.
Torralba, Antonio
Isola, Phillip
author_facet Duggal, Shivam
Byun, Sanghyun
Freeman, William T.
Torralba, Antonio
Isola, Phillip
contents According to Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT) -- Intelligent representations compress data into the shortest possible program that can reconstruct its content, exhibiting low Kolmogorov Complexity (KC). In contrast, most visual representation learning systems use fixed-length representations for all inputs, ignoring variations in complexity or familiarity. Recent adaptive tokenization methods address this by allocating variable-length representations but typically require test-time search over multiple encodings to find the most predictive one. Inspired by Kolmogorov Complexity principles, we propose a single-pass adaptive tokenizer, KARL, which predicts the appropriate number of tokens for an image in a single forward pass, halting once its approximate KC is reached. The token count serves as a proxy for the minimum description length. KARL's training procedure closely resembles the Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning paradigm, as it learns to conditionally predict token halting based on a desired reconstruction quality. KARL matches the performance of recent adaptive tokenizers while operating in a single pass. We present scaling laws for KARL, analyzing the role of encoder/decoder size, continuous vs. discrete tokenization and more. Additionally, we offer a conceptual study drawing an analogy between Adaptive Image Tokenization and Algorithmic Information Theory, examining the predicted image complexity (KC) across axes such as structure vs. noise and in- vs. out-of-distribution familiarity -- revealing alignment with human intuition.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_07995
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Single-pass Adaptive Image Tokenization for Minimum Program Search
Duggal, Shivam
Byun, Sanghyun
Freeman, William T.
Torralba, Antonio
Isola, Phillip
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
According to Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT) -- Intelligent representations compress data into the shortest possible program that can reconstruct its content, exhibiting low Kolmogorov Complexity (KC). In contrast, most visual representation learning systems use fixed-length representations for all inputs, ignoring variations in complexity or familiarity. Recent adaptive tokenization methods address this by allocating variable-length representations but typically require test-time search over multiple encodings to find the most predictive one. Inspired by Kolmogorov Complexity principles, we propose a single-pass adaptive tokenizer, KARL, which predicts the appropriate number of tokens for an image in a single forward pass, halting once its approximate KC is reached. The token count serves as a proxy for the minimum description length. KARL's training procedure closely resembles the Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning paradigm, as it learns to conditionally predict token halting based on a desired reconstruction quality. KARL matches the performance of recent adaptive tokenizers while operating in a single pass. We present scaling laws for KARL, analyzing the role of encoder/decoder size, continuous vs. discrete tokenization and more. Additionally, we offer a conceptual study drawing an analogy between Adaptive Image Tokenization and Algorithmic Information Theory, examining the predicted image complexity (KC) across axes such as structure vs. noise and in- vs. out-of-distribution familiarity -- revealing alignment with human intuition.
title Single-pass Adaptive Image Tokenization for Minimum Program Search
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07995