Pith. sign in

REVIEW 27 cited by

Generating Images with Sparse Representations

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2103.03841 v1 pith:OFYD3BQB submitted 2021-03-05 cs.CV stat.ML

Generating Images with Sparse Representations

classification cs.CV stat.ML
keywords imageshighimagemodelsapproacharchitecturelikelihood-basedmethods
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

The high dimensionality of images presents architecture and sampling-efficiency challenges for likelihood-based generative models. Previous approaches such as VQ-VAE use deep autoencoders to obtain compact representations, which are more practical as inputs for likelihood-based models. We present an alternative approach, inspired by common image compression methods like JPEG, and convert images to quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) blocks, which are represented sparsely as a sequence of DCT channel, spatial location, and DCT coefficient triples. We propose a Transformer-based autoregressive architecture, which is trained to sequentially predict the conditional distribution of the next element in such sequences, and which scales effectively to high resolution images. On a range of image datasets, we demonstrate that our approach can generate high quality, diverse images, with sample metric scores competitive with state of the art methods. We additionally show that simple modifications to our method yield effective image colorization and super-resolution models.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 27 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Language-Assisted Super-Resolution from Real-World Low-Resolution Patches

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    LA-SR redefines unpaired super-resolution in language space by projecting images into a semantically rich representation and applying vision-language model guided losses to handle real-world degradations extracted fro...

  2. MaskAlign: Token-Subset Representation Alignment for Efficient Diffusion Training

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    MaskAlign uses random token-subset alignment and pre-mask mixing to reduce diffusion models' reliance on complete clean-image token sets during representation alignment.

  3. Beyond Generative Priors: Minority Sampling with JEPA-Guided Diffusion

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    JEPA guidance steers diffusion models toward low-density regions under an implicit density from a world model, producing minority samples with improved fidelity and semantic validity over generator-centric baselines.

  4. The Velocity Deficit: Initial Energy Injection for Flow Matching

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Flow matching underestimates velocities due to MSE loss leading to integration lag; Initial Energy Injection corrects the start-end asymmetry, improving FID by 44.6% and achieving 5x speedup on ImageNet-1k.

  5. Coevolving Representations in Joint Image-Feature Diffusion

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    CoReDi coevolves semantic representations with the diffusion model via a jointly learned linear projection stabilized by stop-gradient, normalization, and regularization, yielding faster convergence and higher sample ...

  6. Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation

    cs.CV 2024-06 conditional novelty 7.0

    Scaled vanilla autoregressive models based on Llama achieve 2.18 FID on ImageNet 256x256 image generation, beating popular diffusion models without visual inductive biases.

  7. Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers

    cs.CV 2022-12 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DiTs achieve SOTA FID of 2.27 on ImageNet 256x256 by scaling transformer-based latent diffusion models, with performance improving consistently as Gflops increase.

  8. Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis

    cs.LG 2021-05 accept novelty 7.0

    Diffusion models with architecture improvements and classifier guidance achieve superior FID scores to GANs on unconditional and conditional ImageNet image synthesis.

  9. Post-Training Pruning for Diffusion Transformers

    cs.CV 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DiT-Pruning introduces an energy-based saliency metric balancing weights and activations plus clustering-aware granularity for post-training pruning of DiTs, showing near-zero CLIP score degradation at 50% sparsity on...

  10. Scaling Parallel Sequence Models to Foundation-Scale Vision Encoders

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    C-GSPN scales 2D spatial propagation to foundation vision encoders via a fast CUDA kernel, compressed blocks, and two-stage distillation, matching ViT performance with 15% fewer parameters and 4x block speedup at 2K r...

  11. Colored Noise Diffusion Sampling

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CNS is a plug-and-play stochastic sampler for diffusion models that uses timestep- and frequency-dependent colored noise to allocate energy to unresolved bands, producing lower FID scores than standard ODE/SDE baselin...

  12. Frequency-Guided Action Diffusion via Sub-Frequency Manifold Traversal

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    FGO guides diffusion policy generation via expanding spectral bands on sub-frequency manifolds to improve action smoothness on 15 robotic manipulation tasks.

  13. Beyond Point-Wise Matching: Structural Representation Alignment for Accelerating Diffusion Transformers

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    sREPA enforces structural consistency in relational geometry of pre-trained vision features to accelerate DiT training and improve generation quality.

  14. HyperDiT: Hyper-Connected Transformers for High-Fidelity Pixel-Space Diffusion

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    HyperDiT achieves FID 1.56 on ImageNet 256x256 in pixel space via hyper-connected cross-scale interactions, cross-attention, SA-RoPE, and VFM registers.

  15. The Thinking Pixel: Recursive Sparse Reasoning in Multimodal Diffusion Latents

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A recursive sparse MoE framework integrated into diffusion models iteratively refines visual tokens via gated module selection to improve structured reasoning and image generation performance.

  16. Data Warmup: Complexity-Aware Curricula for Efficient Diffusion Training

    cs.LG 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    Data Warmup accelerates diffusion training on ImageNet by scheduling images from low to high complexity via a foreground-based metric and temperature-controlled sampler, improving FID and IS scores faster than uniform...

  17. Mirai: Autoregressive Visual Generation Needs Foresight

    cs.CV 2026-01 conditional novelty 6.0

    Mirai injects future-token foresight into autoregressive visual generators, accelerating convergence up to 10x and cutting ImageNet FID from 5.34 to 4.34.

  18. DeCo: Frequency-Decoupled Pixel Diffusion for End-to-End Image Generation

    cs.CV 2025-11 conditional novelty 6.0

    DeCo decouples high- and low-frequency generation in pixel diffusion via a DiT plus lightweight decoder and a frequency-aware flow-matching loss, reaching FID 1.62 at 256x256 and 2.22 at 512x512 on ImageNet while clos...

  19. VFM-VAE: Vision Foundation Models Can Be Good Tokenizers for Latent Diffusion Models

    cs.CV 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    VFM-VAE uses a frozen VFM directly as LDM tokenizer via a custom decoder, reaching gFID 2.22 in 80 epochs and 1.62 after 640 epochs.

  20. RobuQ: Pushing DiTs to W1.58A2 via Robust Activation Quantization

    cs.CV 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0

    RobuQ delivers the first stable DiT image generation at W1.58A2 average bits via Hadamard-based robust activation quantization and layer-wise mixed-precision activations.

  21. Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN

    cs.CV 2021-10 accept novelty 6.0

    Improved ViT-VQGAN enables autoregressive Transformer pretraining on ImageNet tokens to reach IS 175.1 and FID 4.17 for generation plus 73.2% linear-probe accuracy, beating prior iGPT models.

  22. From SRA to Self-Flow: Data Augmentation or Self-Supervision?

    cs.CV 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Attention Separation ablations show that gains from SRA to Self-Flow in diffusion transformers arise mainly from noise-dimension data augmentation rather than token-level self-supervision.

  23. Language-Assisted Super-Resolution from Real-World Low-Resolution Patches

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    LA-SR extracts real LR patches from depth-varying regions in single images and uses vision-language models with linguistic content and quality losses for unpaired super-resolution.

  24. Mutual Enhancement Between Global Tokens and Patch Tokens: From Theory to Practice

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    TaTok is a theoretically grounded adaptive tokenization method that uses global tokens and cumulative conditional entropy filtering to reduce redundancy while improving reconstruction quality over fixed-rate patch tok...

  25. HyperDiT: Hyper-Connected Transformers for High-Fidelity Pixel-Space Diffusion

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    HyperDiT reports FID 1.56 on ImageNet 256x256 using hyper-connected cross-scale attention, SA-RoPE, and VFM registers in pixel space.

  26. Elucidating Representation Degradation Problem in Diffusion Model Training

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Diffusion models suffer representation degradation at high noise due to recoverability mismatch; ERD mitigates this by dynamic optimization reallocation, accelerating convergence across backbones.

  27. Evolution of Video Generative Foundations

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    This survey traces video generation technology from GANs to diffusion models and then to autoregressive and multimodal approaches while analyzing principles, strengths, and future trends.