M-VAR: Decoupled Scale-wise Autoregressive Modeling for High-Quality Image Generation

Kavli Affiliate: Feng Wang

| First 5 Authors: Sucheng Ren, Yaodong Yu, Nataniel Ruiz, Feng Wang, Alan Yuille

| Summary:

There exists recent work in computer vision, named VAR, that proposes a new
autoregressive paradigm for image generation. Diverging from the vanilla
next-token prediction, VAR structurally reformulates the image generation into
a coarse to fine next-scale prediction. In this paper, we show that this
scale-wise autoregressive framework can be effectively decoupled into
textit{intra-scale modeling}, which captures local spatial dependencies within
each scale, and textit{inter-scale modeling}, which models cross-scale
relationships progressively from coarse-to-fine scales. This decoupling
structure allows to rebuild VAR in a more computationally efficient manner.
Specifically, for intra-scale modeling — crucial for generating high-fidelity
images — we retain the original bidirectional self-attention design to ensure
comprehensive modeling; for inter-scale modeling, which semantically connects
different scales but is computationally intensive, we apply linear-complexity
mechanisms like Mamba to substantially reduce computational overhead. We term
this new framework M-VAR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method
outperforms existing models in both image quality and generation speed. For
example, our 1.5B model, with fewer parameters and faster inference speed,
outperforms the largest VAR-d30-2B. Moreover, our largest model M-VAR-d32
impressively registers 1.78 FID on ImageNet 256$times$256 and outperforms the
prior-art autoregressive models LlamaGen/VAR by 0.4/0.19 and popular diffusion
models LDM/DiT by 1.82/0.49, respectively. Code is avaiable at
url{https://github.com/OliverRensu/MVAR}.

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