{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/ar-rag-autoregressive-retrieval-augmentation","title":"AR-RAG: Autoregressive Retrieval Augmentation for Image Generation","arxiv_id":"2506.06962","date":"2025-06-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jingyuan Qi","Zhiyang Xu","Qifan Wang","Lifu Huang"],"abstract":"We introduce Autoregressive Retrieval Augmentation (AR-RAG), a novel paradigm that enhances image generation by autoregressively incorporating knearest neighbor retrievals at the patch level. Unlike prior methods that perform a single, static retrieval before generation and condition the entire generation on fixed reference images, AR-RAG performs context-aware retrievals at each generation step, using prior-generated patches as queries to retrieve and incorporate the most relevant patch-level visual references, enabling the model to respond to evolving generation needs while avoiding limitations (e.g., over-copying, stylistic bias, etc.) prevalent in existing methods. To realize AR-RAG, we propose two parallel frameworks: (1) Distribution-Augmentation in Decoding (DAiD), a training-free plug-and-use decoding strategy that directly merges the distribution of model-predicted patches with the distribution of retrieved patches, and (2) Feature-Augmentation in Decoding (FAiD), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that progressively smooths the features of retrieved patches via multi-scale convolution operations and leverages them to augment the image generation process. We validate the effectiveness of AR-RAG on widely adopted benchmarks, including Midjourney-30K, GenEval and DPG-Bench, demonstrating significant performance gains over state-of-the-art image generation models.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06962v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06962v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"ar-rag-autoregressive-retrieval-augmentation","repo_url":"https://github.com/PLUM-Lab/AR-RAG","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-generation","task_name":"Image Generation"},{"task_slug":"rag","task_name":"RAG"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"parameter-efficient-fine-tuning","task_name":"parameter-efficient fine-tuning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2506.06962","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}