Papers › Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization
Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization
Doyup Lee, Chiheon Kim, Saehoon Kim, Minsu Cho, Wook-Shin Han
For autoregressive (AR) modeling of high-resolution images, vector quantization (VQ) represents an image as a sequence of discrete codes. A short sequence length is important for an AR model to reduce its computational costs to consider long-range interactions of codes. However, we postulate that previous VQ cannot shorten the code sequence and generate high-fidelity images together in terms of the rate-distortion trade-off. In this study, we propose the two-stage framework, which consists of Residual-Quantized VAE (RQ-VAE) and RQ-Transformer, to effectively generate high-resolution images. Given a fixed codebook size, RQ-VAE can precisely approximate a feature map of an image and represent the image as a stacked map of discrete codes. Then, RQ-Transformer learns to predict the quantized feature vector at the next position by predicting the next stack of codes. Thanks to the precise approximation of RQ-VAE, we can represent a 256×256 image as 8×8 resolution of the feature map, and RQ-Transformer can efficiently reduce the computational costs. Consequently, our framework outperforms the existing AR models on various benchmarks of unconditional and conditional image generation. Our approach also has a significantly faster sampling speed than previous AR models to generate high-quality images.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Generation | ImageNet 256x256 | RQ-Transformer | FID | 3.83 | #77 of 94 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Reconstruction | ImageNet | RQ-VAE (8x8x16) | FID | 1.83 | #12 of 15 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Text-to-Image Generation | Conceptual Captions | RQ-Transformer | FID | 12.33 | #2 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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