The Prism Hypothesis: Harmonizing Semantic and Pixel Representations via Unified Autoencoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fan, Weichen, Diao, Haiwen, Wang, Quan, Lin, Dahua, Liu, Ziwei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fan, Weichen
Diao, Haiwen
Wang, Quan
Lin, Dahua
Liu, Ziwei
author_facet Fan, Weichen
Diao, Haiwen
Wang, Quan
Lin, Dahua
Liu, Ziwei
contents Deep representations across modalities are inherently intertwined. In this paper, we systematically analyze the spectral characteristics of various semantic and pixel encoders. Interestingly, our study uncovers a highly inspiring and rarely explored correspondence between an encoder's feature spectrum and its functional role: semantic encoders primarily capture low-frequency components that encode abstract meaning, whereas pixel encoders additionally retain high-frequency information that conveys fine-grained detail. This heuristic finding offers a unifying perspective that ties encoder behavior to its underlying spectral structure. We define it as the Prism Hypothesis, where each data modality can be viewed as a projection of the natural world onto a shared feature spectrum, just like the prism. Building on this insight, we propose Unified Autoencoding (UAE), a model that harmonizes semantic structure and pixel details via an innovative frequency-band modulator, enabling their seamless coexistence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UAE effectively unifies semantic abstraction and pixel-level fidelity within a single latent space, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, we show that UAE can be directly applied to pixel-space modeling, significantly improving both FID and IS over the vanilla JIT baseline. Our code is avaliable at: https://github.com/WeichenFan/UAE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_19693
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Prism Hypothesis: Harmonizing Semantic and Pixel Representations via Unified Autoencoding
Fan, Weichen
Diao, Haiwen
Wang, Quan
Lin, Dahua
Liu, Ziwei
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Deep representations across modalities are inherently intertwined. In this paper, we systematically analyze the spectral characteristics of various semantic and pixel encoders. Interestingly, our study uncovers a highly inspiring and rarely explored correspondence between an encoder's feature spectrum and its functional role: semantic encoders primarily capture low-frequency components that encode abstract meaning, whereas pixel encoders additionally retain high-frequency information that conveys fine-grained detail. This heuristic finding offers a unifying perspective that ties encoder behavior to its underlying spectral structure. We define it as the Prism Hypothesis, where each data modality can be viewed as a projection of the natural world onto a shared feature spectrum, just like the prism. Building on this insight, we propose Unified Autoencoding (UAE), a model that harmonizes semantic structure and pixel details via an innovative frequency-band modulator, enabling their seamless coexistence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UAE effectively unifies semantic abstraction and pixel-level fidelity within a single latent space, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, we show that UAE can be directly applied to pixel-space modeling, significantly improving both FID and IS over the vanilla JIT baseline. Our code is avaliable at: https://github.com/WeichenFan/UAE.
title The Prism Hypothesis: Harmonizing Semantic and Pixel Representations via Unified Autoencoding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19693