{"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/cyclevar-repurposing-autoregressive-model-for","title":"CycleVAR: Repurposing Autoregressive Model for Unsupervised One-Step Image Translation","arxiv_id":"2506.23347","date":"2025-06-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yi Liu","Shengqian Li","Zuzeng Lin","Feng Wang","Si Liu"],"abstract":"The current conditional autoregressive image generation methods have shown promising results, yet their potential remains largely unexplored in the practical unsupervised image translation domain, which operates without explicit cross-domain correspondences. A critical limitation stems from the discrete quantization inherent in traditional Vector Quantization-based frameworks, which disrupts gradient flow between the Variational Autoencoder decoder and causal Transformer, impeding end-to-end optimization during adversarial training in image space. To tackle this issue, we propose using Softmax Relaxed Quantization, a novel approach that reformulates codebook selection as a continuous probability mixing process via Softmax, thereby preserving gradient propagation. Building upon this differentiable foundation, we introduce CycleVAR, which reformulates image-to-image translation as image-conditional visual autoregressive generation by injecting multi-scale source image tokens as contextual prompts, analogous to prefix-based conditioning in language models. CycleVAR exploits two modes to generate the target image tokens, including (1) serial multi-step generation, enabling iterative refinement across scales, and (2) parallel one-step generation synthesizing all resolution outputs in a single forward pass. Experimental findings indicate that the parallel one-step generation mode attains superior translation quality with quicker inference speed than the serial multi-step mode in unsupervised scenarios. Furthermore, both quantitative and qualitative results indicate that CycleVAR surpasses previous state-of-the-art unsupervised image translation models, \\textit{e}.\\textit{g}., CycleGAN-Turbo.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23347v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23347v2.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":"cyclevar-repurposing-autoregressive-model-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/iamcreateai/cyclevar","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-generation","task_name":"Image Generation"},{"task_slug":"image-to-image-translation","task_name":"Image-to-Image Translation"},{"task_slug":"quantization","task_name":"Quantization"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"speed","method_name":"SPEED"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2506.23347","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}