{"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/coda-repurposing-continuous-vaes-for-discrete","title":"CODA: Repurposing Continuous VAEs for Discrete Tokenization","arxiv_id":"2503.17760","date":"2025-03-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zeyu Liu","Zanlin Ni","Yeguo Hua","Xin Deng","Xiao Ma","Cheng Zhong","Gao Huang"],"abstract":"Discrete visual tokenizers transform images into a sequence of tokens, enabling token-based visual generation akin to language models. However, this process is inherently challenging, as it requires both compressing visual signals into a compact representation and discretizing them into a fixed set of codes. Traditional discrete tokenizers typically learn the two tasks jointly, often leading to unstable training, low codebook utilization, and limited reconstruction quality. In this paper, we introduce \\textbf{CODA}(\\textbf{CO}ntinuous-to-\\textbf{D}iscrete \\textbf{A}daptation), a framework that decouples compression and discretization. Instead of training discrete tokenizers from scratch, CODA adapts off-the-shelf continuous VAEs -- already optimized for perceptual compression -- into discrete tokenizers via a carefully designed discretization process. By primarily focusing on discretization, CODA ensures stable and efficient training while retaining the strong visual fidelity of continuous VAEs. Empirically, with $\\mathbf{6 \\times}$ less training budget than standard VQGAN, our approach achieves a remarkable codebook utilization of 100% and notable reconstruction FID (rFID) of $\\mathbf{0.43}$ and $\\mathbf{1.34}$ for $8 \\times$ and $16 \\times$ compression on ImageNet 256$\\times$ 256 benchmark.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17760v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17760v1.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":"coda-repurposing-continuous-vaes-for-discrete","repo_url":"https://github.com/westlake-repl/leanvae","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2503.17760","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2503.17760","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}