V2Flow: Unifying Visual Tokenization and Large Language Model Vocabularies for Autoregressive Image Generation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.07493v1
• Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 16:12:50 GMT
• Title: V2Flow: Unifying Visual Tokenization and Large Language Model Vocabularies for Autoregressive Image Generation
• Abstract summary: We propose V2Flow, a novel tokenizer that produces discrete visual tokens capable of high-fidelity reconstruction.<n>V2Flow enables autoregressive visual generation on top of existing language models.
• Score: 20.436493280226337
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: We propose V2Flow, a novel tokenizer that produces discrete visual tokens capable of high-fidelity reconstruction, while ensuring structural and latent distribution alignment with the vocabulary space of large language models (LLMs). Leveraging this tight visual-vocabulary coupling, V2Flow enables autoregressive visual generation on top of existing LLMs. Our approach formulates visual tokenization as a flow-matching problem, aiming to learn a mapping from a standard normal prior to the continuous image distribution, conditioned on token sequences embedded within the LLMs vocabulary space. The effectiveness of V2Flow stems from two core designs. First, we propose a Visual Vocabulary resampler, which compresses visual data into compact token sequences, with each represented as a soft categorical distribution over LLM's vocabulary. This allows seamless integration of visual tokens into existing LLMs for autoregressive visual generation. Second, we present a masked autoregressive Rectified-Flow decoder, employing a masked transformer encoder-decoder to refine visual tokens into contextually enriched embeddings. These embeddings then condition a dedicated velocity field for precise reconstruction. Additionally, an autoregressive rectified-flow sampling strategy is incorporated, ensuring flexible sequence lengths while preserving competitive reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments show that V2Flow outperforms mainstream VQ-based tokenizers and facilitates autoregressive visual generation on top of existing. https://github.com/zhangguiwei610/V2Flow

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