English

ARINAR: Bi-Level Autoregressive Feature-by-Feature Generative Models

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-03-05 v1

Abstract

Existing autoregressive (AR) image generative models use a token-by-token generation schema. That is, they predict a per-token probability distribution and sample the next token from that distribution. The main challenge is how to model the complex distribution of high-dimensional tokens. Previous methods either are too simplistic to fit the distribution or result in slow generation speed. Instead of fitting the distribution of the whole tokens, we explore using a AR model to generate each token in a feature-by-feature way, i.e., taking the generated features as input and generating the next feature. Based on that, we propose ARINAR (AR-in-AR), a bi-level AR model. The outer AR layer take previous tokens as input, predicts a condition vector z for the next token. The inner layer, conditional on z, generates features of the next token autoregressively. In this way, the inner layer only needs to model the distribution of a single feature, for example, using a simple Gaussian Mixture Model. On the ImageNet 256x256 image generation task, ARINAR-B with 213M parameters achieves an FID of 2.75, which is comparable to the state-of-the-art MAR-B model (FID=2.31), while five times faster than the latter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.02883,
  title  = {ARINAR: Bi-Level Autoregressive Feature-by-Feature Generative Models},
  author = {Qinyu Zhao and Stephen Gould and Liang Zheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.02883},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Technical report. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qinyu-Allen-Zhao/Arinar

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:06:52.606Z