LINA: Linear Autoregressive Image Generative Models with Continuous Tokens

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wang, Jiahao, Pan, Ting, Deng, Haoge, Han, Dongchen, Wu, Taiqiang, Wang, Xinlong, Luo, Ping
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Wang, Jiahao
Pan, Ting
Deng, Haoge
Han, Dongchen
Wu, Taiqiang
Wang, Xinlong
Luo, Ping
author_facet Wang, Jiahao
Pan, Ting
Deng, Haoge
Han, Dongchen
Wu, Taiqiang
Wang, Xinlong
Luo, Ping
contents Autoregressive models with continuous tokens form a promising paradigm for visual generation, especially for text-to-image (T2I) synthesis, but they suffer from high computational cost. We study how to design compute-efficient linear attention within this framework. Specifically, we conduct a systematic empirical analysis of scaling behavior with respect to parameter counts under different design choices, focusing on (1) normalization paradigms in linear attention (division-based vs. subtraction-based) and (2) depthwise convolution for locality augmentation. Our results show that although subtraction-based normalization is effective for image classification, division-based normalization scales better for linear generative transformers. In addition, incorporating convolution for locality modeling plays a crucial role in autoregressive generation, consistent with findings in diffusion models. We further extend gating mechanisms, commonly used in causal linear attention, to the bidirectional setting and propose a KV gate. By introducing data-independent learnable parameters to the key and value states, the KV gate assigns token-wise memory weights, enabling flexible memory management similar to forget gates in language models. Based on these findings, we present LINA, a simple and compute-efficient T2I model built entirely on linear attention, capable of generating high-fidelity 1024x1024 images from user instructions. LINA achieves competitive performance on both class-conditional and T2I benchmarks, obtaining 2.18 FID on ImageNet (about 1.4B parameters) and 0.74 on GenEval (about 1.5B parameters). A single linear attention module reduces FLOPs by about 61 percent compared to softmax attention. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/techmonsterwang/LINA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22630
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LINA: Linear Autoregressive Image Generative Models with Continuous Tokens
Wang, Jiahao
Pan, Ting
Deng, Haoge
Han, Dongchen
Wu, Taiqiang
Wang, Xinlong
Luo, Ping
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Autoregressive models with continuous tokens form a promising paradigm for visual generation, especially for text-to-image (T2I) synthesis, but they suffer from high computational cost. We study how to design compute-efficient linear attention within this framework. Specifically, we conduct a systematic empirical analysis of scaling behavior with respect to parameter counts under different design choices, focusing on (1) normalization paradigms in linear attention (division-based vs. subtraction-based) and (2) depthwise convolution for locality augmentation. Our results show that although subtraction-based normalization is effective for image classification, division-based normalization scales better for linear generative transformers. In addition, incorporating convolution for locality modeling plays a crucial role in autoregressive generation, consistent with findings in diffusion models. We further extend gating mechanisms, commonly used in causal linear attention, to the bidirectional setting and propose a KV gate. By introducing data-independent learnable parameters to the key and value states, the KV gate assigns token-wise memory weights, enabling flexible memory management similar to forget gates in language models. Based on these findings, we present LINA, a simple and compute-efficient T2I model built entirely on linear attention, capable of generating high-fidelity 1024x1024 images from user instructions. LINA achieves competitive performance on both class-conditional and T2I benchmarks, obtaining 2.18 FID on ImageNet (about 1.4B parameters) and 0.74 on GenEval (about 1.5B parameters). A single linear attention module reduces FLOPs by about 61 percent compared to softmax attention. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/techmonsterwang/LINA.
title LINA: Linear Autoregressive Image Generative Models with Continuous Tokens
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22630