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Auteurs principaux: Li, Yan, Liao, Ning, Zhao, Xiangyu, Zhang, Shaofeng, Wang, Xiaoxing, Yang, Yifan, Yan, Junchi, Yang, Xue
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12108
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author Li, Yan
Liao, Ning
Zhao, Xiangyu
Zhang, Shaofeng
Wang, Xiaoxing
Yang, Yifan
Yan, Junchi
Yang, Xue
author_facet Li, Yan
Liao, Ning
Zhao, Xiangyu
Zhang, Shaofeng
Wang, Xiaoxing
Yang, Yifan
Yan, Junchi
Yang, Xue
contents The development of unified multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is fundamentally challenged by the granularity gap between visual understanding and generation: understanding requires high-level semantic abstractions, while image generation demands fine-grained pixel-level representations. Existing approaches usually enforce the two supervision on the same set of representation or decouple these two supervision on separate feature spaces, leading to interference and inconsistency, respectively. In this work, we propose EvoTok, a unified image tokenizer that reconciles these requirements through a residual evolution process within a shared latent space. Instead of maintaining separate token spaces for pixels and semantics, EvoTok encodes an image into a cascaded sequence of residual tokens via residual vector quantization. This residual sequence forms an evolution trajectory where earlier stages capture low-level details and deeper stages progressively transition toward high-level semantic representations. Despite being trained on a relatively modest dataset of 13M images, far smaller than the billion-scale datasets used by many previous unified tokenizers, EvoTok achieves a strong reconstruction quality of 0.43 rFID on ImageNet-1K at 256x256 resolution. When integrated with a large language model, EvoTok shows promising performance across 7 out of 9 visual understanding benchmarks, and remarkable results on image generation benchmarks such as GenEval and GenAI-Bench. These results demonstrate that modeling visual representations as an evolving trajectory provides an effective and principled solution for unifying visual understanding and generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_12108
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EvoTok: A Unified Image Tokenizer via Residual Latent Evolution for Visual Understanding and Generation
Li, Yan
Liao, Ning
Zhao, Xiangyu
Zhang, Shaofeng
Wang, Xiaoxing
Yang, Yifan
Yan, Junchi
Yang, Xue
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The development of unified multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is fundamentally challenged by the granularity gap between visual understanding and generation: understanding requires high-level semantic abstractions, while image generation demands fine-grained pixel-level representations. Existing approaches usually enforce the two supervision on the same set of representation or decouple these two supervision on separate feature spaces, leading to interference and inconsistency, respectively. In this work, we propose EvoTok, a unified image tokenizer that reconciles these requirements through a residual evolution process within a shared latent space. Instead of maintaining separate token spaces for pixels and semantics, EvoTok encodes an image into a cascaded sequence of residual tokens via residual vector quantization. This residual sequence forms an evolution trajectory where earlier stages capture low-level details and deeper stages progressively transition toward high-level semantic representations. Despite being trained on a relatively modest dataset of 13M images, far smaller than the billion-scale datasets used by many previous unified tokenizers, EvoTok achieves a strong reconstruction quality of 0.43 rFID on ImageNet-1K at 256x256 resolution. When integrated with a large language model, EvoTok shows promising performance across 7 out of 9 visual understanding benchmarks, and remarkable results on image generation benchmarks such as GenEval and GenAI-Bench. These results demonstrate that modeling visual representations as an evolving trajectory provides an effective and principled solution for unifying visual understanding and generation.
title EvoTok: A Unified Image Tokenizer via Residual Latent Evolution for Visual Understanding and Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12108