Papers › Neighboring Autoregressive Modeling for Efficient Visual Generation

Neighboring Autoregressive Modeling for Efficient Visual Generation

12 Mar 2025arXiv:2503.10696archive 2025-07-28

Yefei He, Yuanyu He, Shaoxuan He, Feng Chen, Hong Zhou, Kaipeng Zhang, Bohan Zhuang

Visual autoregressive models typically adhere to a raster-order ``next-token prediction" paradigm, which overlooks the spatial and temporal locality inherent in visual content. Specifically, visual tokens exhibit significantly stronger correlations with their spatially or temporally adjacent tokens compared to those that are distant. In this paper, we propose Neighboring Autoregressive Modeling (NAR), a novel paradigm that formulates autoregressive visual generation as a progressive outpainting procedure, following a near-to-far ``next-neighbor prediction" mechanism. Starting from an initial token, the remaining tokens are decoded in ascending order of their Manhattan distance from the initial token in the spatial-temporal space, progressively expanding the boundary of the decoded region. To enable parallel prediction of multiple adjacent tokens in the spatial-temporal space, we introduce a set of dimension-oriented decoding heads, each predicting the next token along a mutually orthogonal dimension. During inference, all tokens adjacent to the decoded tokens are processed in parallel, substantially reducing the model forward steps for generation. Experiments on ImageNet$256\times 256$ and UCF101 demonstrate that NAR achieves 2.4× and 8.6× higher throughput respectively, while obtaining superior FID/FVD scores for both image and video generation tasks compared to the PAR-4X approach. When evaluating on text-to-image generation benchmark GenEval, NAR with 0.8B parameters outperforms Chameleon-7B while using merely 0.4 of the training data. Code is available at https://github.com/ThisisBillhe/NAR.

PaperPDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2503.10696")

Code

Syntology Ran 2 of 5 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 3 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 2 ran with no contract checked.

By repository: official repository: 5 samples from 1 repository, 2 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

thisisbillhe/nar officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

5 samples harvested; 2 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 3 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

2ran
3unverified

Licence: 5 of the 5 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from thisisbillhe/nar. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

FeedForward thisisbillhe/nar/NAR-images/autoregressive/models/gpt.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · 3a7d232cb0775401 · report
ModelArgs thisisbillhe/nar/NAR-images/autoregressive/models/gpt.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · ff18a471216c16a9 · report
Attention thisisbillhe/nar/NAR-images/autoregressive/models/gpt.py official repository unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 653880a319e2a083 · report
Transformer thisisbillhe/nar/NAR-images/autoregressive/models/gpt.py official repository unverified no licence file found · pointer only · c3060bac0efc642b · report
TransformerBlock thisisbillhe/nar/NAR-images/autoregressive/models/gpt.py official repository unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 0421358adba1260b · report

Tasks

Image GenerationText to Image GenerationText-to-Image GenerationVideo Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

SET

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections