ResTok: Learning Hierarchical Residuals in 1D Visual Tokenizers for Autoregressive Image Generation
Existing 1D visual tokenizers for autoregressive (AR) generation largely follow the design principles of language modeling, as they are built directly upon transformers whose priors originate in language, yielding single-hierarchy latent tokens and treating visual data as flat sequential token streams. However, this language-like formulation overlooks key properties of vision, particularly the hierarchical and residual network designs that have long been essential for convergence and efficiency in visual models. To bring "vision" back to vision, we propose the Residual Tokenizer (ResTok), a 1D visual tokenizer that builds hierarchical residuals for both image tokens and latent tokens. The hierarchical representations obtained through progressively merging enable cross-level feature fusion at each layer, substantially enhancing representational capacity. Meanwhile, the semantic residuals between hierarchies prevent information overlap, yielding more concentrated latent distributions that are easier for AR modeling. Cross-level bindings consequently emerge without any explicit constraints. To accelerate the generation process, we further introduce a hierarchical AR generator that substantially reduces sampling steps by predicting an entire level of latent tokens at once rather than generating them strictly token-by-token. Extensive experiments demonstrate that restoring hierarchical residual priors in visual tokenization significantly improves AR image generation, achieving a gFID of 2.34 on ImageNet-256 with only 9 sampling steps. Code is available at https://github.com/Kwai-Kolors/ResTok.
695f6d305fa3847525c42030
Xu Zhang
claimed_verified
2026-01-09T08:36:16.470Z
66163a086dff9352ba4ec91b
/avatars/235e261e36549223e45b5750ae0860bd.svg
Xu Zhang
xushu-me
user
xushu-me
695f6d305fa3847525c42031
Cheng Da
695f6d305fa3847525c42032
Huan Yang
695f6d305fa3847525c42033
Kun Gai
695f6d305fa3847525c42034
Ming Lu
695f6d305fa3847525c42035
Zhan Ma
ResTok: Learning Hierarchical Residuals in 1D Visual Tokenizers for Autoregressive Image Generation
Existing 1D visual tokenizers for autoregressive (AR) generation largely follow the design principles of language modeling, as they are built directly upon transformers whose priors originate in language, yielding single-hierarchy latent tokens and treating visual data as flat sequential token streams. However, this language-like formulation overlooks key properties of vision, particularly the hierarchical and residual network designs that have long been essential for convergence and efficiency in visual models. To bring "vision" back to vision, we propose the Residual Tokenizer (ResTok), a 1D visual tokenizer that builds hierarchical residuals for both image tokens and latent tokens. The hierarchical representations obtained through progressively merging enable cross-level feature fusion at each layer, substantially enhancing representational capacity. Meanwhile, the semantic residuals between hierarchies prevent information overlap, yielding more concentrated latent distributions that are easier for AR modeling. Cross-level bindings consequently emerge without any explicit constraints. To accelerate the generation process, we further introduce a hierarchical AR generator that substantially reduces sampling steps by predicting an entire level of latent tokens at once rather than generating them strictly token-by-token. Extensive experiments demonstrate that restoring hierarchical residual priors in visual tokenization significantly improves AR image generation, achieving a gFID of 2.34 on ImageNet-256 with only 9 sampling steps. Code is available at https://github.com/Kwai-Kolors/ResTok.
A novel 1D visual tokenizer called Residual Tokenizer is introduced that incorporates hierarchical residuals to improve autoregressive image generation by leveraging vision-specific design principles rather than language modeling approaches.
visual tokenizer autoregressive generation transformers hierarchical residuals latent tokens cross-level feature fusion semantic residuals hierarchical AR generator gFID ImageNet-256