Adapting Self-Supervised Representations as a Latent Space for Efficient Generation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14630v1
• Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:43:03 GMT
• Title: Adapting Self-Supervised Representations as a Latent Space for Efficient Generation
• Authors: Ming Gui, Johannes Schusterbauer, Timy Phan, Felix Krause, Josh Susskind, Miguel Angel Bautista, Björn Ommer,
• Abstract summary: RepTok is a generative modeling framework that represents an image using a single continuous latent token.<n>RepTok achieves competitive results on class-conditional ImageNet generation and naturally extends to text-to-image synthesis.
• Score: 18.746963205066688
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We introduce Representation Tokenizer (RepTok), a generative modeling framework that represents an image using a single continuous latent token obtained from self-supervised vision transformers. Building on a pre-trained SSL encoder, we fine-tune only the semantic token embedding and pair it with a generative decoder trained jointly using a standard flow matching objective. This adaptation enriches the token with low-level, reconstruction-relevant details, enabling faithful image reconstruction. To preserve the favorable geometry of the original SSL space, we add a cosine-similarity loss that regularizes the adapted token, ensuring the latent space remains smooth and suitable for generation. Our single-token formulation resolves spatial redundancies of 2D latent spaces and significantly reduces training costs. Despite its simplicity and efficiency, RepTok achieves competitive results on class-conditional ImageNet generation and naturally extends to text-to-image synthesis, reaching competitive zero-shot performance on MS-COCO under extremely limited training budgets. Our findings highlight the potential of fine-tuned SSL representations as compact and effective latent spaces for efficient generative modeling.

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