Papers › GIVT: Generative Infinite-Vocabulary Transformers

GIVT: Generative Infinite-Vocabulary Transformers

4 Dec 2023arXiv:2312.02116archive 2025-07-28

Michael Tschannen, Cian Eastwood, Fabian Mentzer

We introduce Generative Infinite-Vocabulary Transformers (GIVT) which generate vector sequences with real-valued entries, instead of discrete tokens from a finite vocabulary. To this end, we propose two surprisingly simple modifications to decoder-only transformers: 1) at the input, we replace the finite-vocabulary lookup table with a linear projection of the input vectors; and 2) at the output, we replace the logits prediction (usually mapped to a categorical distribution) with the parameters of a multivariate Gaussian mixture model. Inspired by the image-generation paradigm of VQ-GAN and MaskGIT, where transformers are used to model the discrete latent sequences of a VQ-VAE, we use GIVT to model the unquantized real-valued latent sequences of a β-VAE. In class-conditional image generation GIVT outperforms VQ-GAN (and improved variants thereof) as well as MaskGIT, and achieves performance competitive with recent latent diffusion models. Finally, we obtain strong results outside of image generation when applying GIVT to panoptic segmentation and depth estimation with a VAE variant of the UViM framework.

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google-research/big_vision officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubjax report
shaochenze/ear mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Tasks

Conditional Image GenerationDecoderDepth EstimationImage GenerationPanoptic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Generation ImageNet 256x256 GIVT-Causal-L+A FID 2.59 #61 of 94 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation ImageNet 512x512 GIVT-Causal-L+A FID 2.92 #40 of 52 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

DiffusionVQ-VAE

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