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Aug 12

RigAnything: Template-Free Autoregressive Rigging for Diverse 3D Assets

We present RigAnything, a novel autoregressive transformer-based model, which makes 3D assets rig-ready by probabilistically generating joints, skeleton topologies, and assigning skinning weights in a template-free manner. Unlike most existing auto-rigging methods, which rely on predefined skeleton template and are limited to specific categories like humanoid, RigAnything approaches the rigging problem in an autoregressive manner, iteratively predicting the next joint based on the global input shape and the previous prediction. While autoregressive models are typically used to generate sequential data, RigAnything extends their application to effectively learn and represent skeletons, which are inherently tree structures. To achieve this, we organize the joints in a breadth-first search (BFS) order, enabling the skeleton to be defined as a sequence of 3D locations and the parent index. Furthermore, our model improves the accuracy of position prediction by leveraging diffusion modeling, ensuring precise and consistent placement of joints within the hierarchy. This formulation allows the autoregressive model to efficiently capture both spatial and hierarchical relationships within the skeleton. Trained end-to-end on both RigNet and Objaverse datasets, RigAnything demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across diverse object types, including humanoids, quadrupeds, marine creatures, insects, and many more, surpassing prior methods in quality, robustness, generalizability, and efficiency. Please check our website for more details: https://www.liuisabella.com/RigAnything.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 13, 2025

ChainFlow-VLA: Causal Flow Planning with Vision-Language Models

Current end-to-end autonomous driving systems are fundamentally limited by a mismatch between temporal causal reasoning and global trajectory consistency. Autoregressive (AR) models capture interaction-aware temporal dependencies via causal factorization, but their step-wise decoding leads to error accumulation and suboptimal global structure. In contrast, diffusion models optimize trajectories globally but lack explicit causal constraints, making them unreliable in interactive and safety-critical scenarios. This dichotomy reveals a deeper issue: existing methods treat causal modeling and global optimization as separate paradigms, without a principled way to unify them within a single trajectory distribution. To address this, we propose ChainFlow-VLA, which unifies causal generation and global refinement within a unified probabilistic framework. We formulate planning as a mixture over AR-induced modes and learn Vision-Language Model (VLM)-conditioned residual distributions over these modes. An autoregressive generator (Chain) produces a discrete set of causal trajectory modes, followed by a diffusion-based refiner (Flow) that leverages VLM hidden states as semantic priors to perform mode-conditioned correction in residual space while preserving causal structure. This straightforward conditioning seamlessly injects high-level scene understanding into fine-grained trajectory adjustments. Experiments demonstrate that ChainFlow-VLA achieves robust planning in ambiguous and long-tail scenarios, achieving a state-of-the-art score of 94.85 on the NAVSIM v1 leaderboard, matching human-level performance (94.8). Code will be available at https://github.com/AFARI-Research/ChainFlow-VLA.

  • 10 authors
·
May 21

Macro-from-Micro Planning for High-Quality and Parallelized Autoregressive Long Video Generation

Current autoregressive diffusion models excel at video generation but are generally limited to short temporal durations. Our theoretical analysis indicates that the autoregressive modeling typically suffers from temporal drift caused by error accumulation and hinders parallelization in long video synthesis. To address these limitations, we propose a novel planning-then-populating framework centered on Macro-from-Micro Planning (MMPL) for long video generation. MMPL sketches a global storyline for the entire video through two hierarchical stages: Micro Planning and Macro Planning. Specifically, Micro Planning predicts a sparse set of future keyframes within each short video segment, offering motion and appearance priors to guide high-quality video segment generation. Macro Planning extends the in-segment keyframes planning across the entire video through an autoregressive chain of micro plans, ensuring long-term consistency across video segments. Subsequently, MMPL-based Content Populating generates all intermediate frames in parallel across segments, enabling efficient parallelization of autoregressive generation. The parallelization is further optimized by Adaptive Workload Scheduling for balanced GPU execution and accelerated autoregressive video generation. Extensive experiments confirm that our method outperforms existing long video generation models in quality and stability. Generated videos and comparison results are in our project page.

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025

Autoregressive Models in Vision: A Survey

Autoregressive modeling has been a huge success in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Recently, autoregressive models have emerged as a significant area of focus in computer vision, where they excel in producing high-quality visual content. Autoregressive models in NLP typically operate on subword tokens. However, the representation strategy in computer vision can vary in different levels, i.e., pixel-level, token-level, or scale-level, reflecting the diverse and hierarchical nature of visual data compared to the sequential structure of language. This survey comprehensively examines the literature on autoregressive models applied to vision. To improve readability for researchers from diverse research backgrounds, we start with preliminary sequence representation and modeling in vision. Next, we divide the fundamental frameworks of visual autoregressive models into three general sub-categories, including pixel-based, token-based, and scale-based models based on the strategy of representation. We then explore the interconnections between autoregressive models and other generative models. Furthermore, we present a multi-faceted categorization of autoregressive models in computer vision, including image generation, video generation, 3D generation, and multi-modal generation. We also elaborate on their applications in diverse domains, including emerging domains such as embodied AI and 3D medical AI, with about 250 related references. Finally, we highlight the current challenges to autoregressive models in vision with suggestions about potential research directions. We have also set up a Github repository to organize the papers included in this survey at: https://github.com/ChaofanTao/Autoregressive-Models-in-Vision-Survey.

  • 20 authors
·
Nov 8, 2024 2

ALPINE: Unveiling the Planning Capability of Autoregressive Learning in Language Models

In this paper, we present the findings of our Project ALPINE which stands for ``Autoregressive Learning for Planning In NEtworks." Project ALPINE initiates a theoretical investigation into the development of planning capabilities in Transformer-based language models through their autoregressive learning mechanisms, aiming to identify any potential limitations in their planning abilities. We abstract planning as a network path-finding task where the objective is to generate a valid path from a specified source node to a designated target node. In terms of expressiveness, we show that the Transformer is capable of executing path-finding by embedding the adjacency and reachability matrices within its weights. Our theoretical analysis of the gradient-based learning dynamic of the Transformer reveals that the Transformer is capable of learning both the adjacency matrix and a limited form of the reachability matrix. These theoretical insights are then validated through experiments, which demonstrate that the Transformer indeed learns the adjacency matrix and an incomplete reachability matrix, which aligns with the predictions made in our theoretical analysis. Additionally, when applying our methodology to a real-world planning benchmark, called Blocksworld, our observations remain consistent. Our theoretical and empirical analyses further unveil a potential limitation of Transformer in path-finding: it cannot identify reachability relationships through transitivity, and thus would fail when path concatenation is needed to generate a path. In summary, our findings shed new light on how the internal mechanisms of autoregressive learning enable planning in networks. This study may contribute to our understanding of the general planning capabilities in other related domains.

  • 6 authors
·
May 15, 2024 1

Masked Diffusion Language Models are Strong and Steerable Text-Based World Models for Agentic RL

Recent growth in reinforcement learning (RL) has surfaced a need for diverse, specialized training environments. Hand-curated environments with fixed task and reward difficulties become ineffective signals as model performance improves, and sparse rewards over long horizons induce mode collapse on specific workflows or tool structures. World models that simulate environment states have matched pure rollout performance, making them promising for scaling diversity on-demand. However, autoregressive (AR) world models suffer from a left-to-right bias preventing conditioning on globally interdependent state anchors such as tool schemas, prior turns, and expected outcomes. We (i) formalize text-based world modeling as a steerable transition-dynamics problem decomposed into initial state, task context, tool schemas, domain rules, and steering directives, and (ii) curate 239,403 grounded state-action trajectories spanning nine open-source environments and twelve frontier model families. We compare AR LMs and masked diffusion language models (MDLMs), showing MDLMs, via bidirectional anchor-aware denoising, achieve better coherence, groundedness, and empirically validated rollout diversity than LLMs over 4x their parameter size, at comparable inference latency. We introduce a plug-and-play GRPO training framework with deterministic state checks, and perform zero-shot transfer ablations on three OOD environments (ScienceWorld, ALFWorld, AppWorld) across three 1.2B-7B agent backbones (LFM2.5, Qwen3, Mistral), achieving up to 47% absolute gains over baselines without environment-specific fine-tuning. We further conduct behavioral analysis of failure modes under adversarial scenarios and human evaluation on realism, outcome correctness, and training utility. We open-source our work to encourage research in this direction.

Efficient Conditional Generation on Scale-based Visual Autoregressive Models

Recent advances in autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated their potential to rival diffusion models in image synthesis. However, for complex spatially-conditioned generation, current AR approaches rely on fine-tuning the pre-trained model, leading to significant training costs. In this paper, we propose the Efficient Control Model (ECM), a plug-and-play framework featuring a lightweight control module that introduces control signals via a distributed architecture. This architecture consists of context-aware attention layers that refine conditional features using real-time generated tokens, and a shared gated feed-forward network (FFN) designed to maximize the utilization of its limited capacity and ensure coherent control feature learning. Furthermore, recognizing the critical role of early-stage generation in determining semantic structure, we introduce an early-centric sampling strategy that prioritizes learning early control sequences. This approach reduces computational cost by lowering the number of training tokens per iteration, while a complementary temperature scheduling during inference compensates for the resulting insufficient training of late-stage tokens. Extensive experiments on scale-based AR models validate that our method achieves high-fidelity and diverse control over image generation, surpassing existing baselines while significantly improving both training and inference efficiency.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 7, 2025

Multi-Turn Reflective Masking Elicits Reasoning in Mask Diffusion Models

While reasoning on autoregressive (AR) models is often performed by chain-of-thought reasoning and reflection, their refinement of previous outputs still relies on fully sequential generation, even when only local edits are needed. In contrast, the masking mechanism in Mask Diffusion Models (MDMs) naturally supports explicit local edits on previous outputs, allowing selective refinement without discarding previous answers and generating another from scratch. While this property more closely aligns with how humans correct mistakes by iterative local refinement, existing MDMs do not support multi-turn masking and denoising. We propose Reflective Masking (RM), which elicits such an intrinsic reasoning capability in MDMs via lightweight post-training. RM provides a native test-time scaling, where an MDM iteratively revisits and revises its prior outputs based on evolving context. To exploit insights from previous turns like AR reasoning, we further introduce History Reference, a parameter-free mechanism that leverages intermediate denoising states during revision. Our approach requires no architectural changes and is easily applicable to existing MDMs. Across diverse tasks and modalities, including text generation, Sudoku, and image editing, Reflective Masking consistently outperforms standard masking-based baselines and demonstrates strong generality, positioning RM as a fundamental primitive for reasoning on MDMs.

umd-zhou-lab Tianyi Lab
·
Jun 14 4

FlowAR: Scale-wise Autoregressive Image Generation Meets Flow Matching

Autoregressive (AR) modeling has achieved remarkable success in natural language processing by enabling models to generate text with coherence and contextual understanding through next token prediction. Recently, in image generation, VAR proposes scale-wise autoregressive modeling, which extends the next token prediction to the next scale prediction, preserving the 2D structure of images. However, VAR encounters two primary challenges: (1) its complex and rigid scale design limits generalization in next scale prediction, and (2) the generator's dependence on a discrete tokenizer with the same complex scale structure restricts modularity and flexibility in updating the tokenizer. To address these limitations, we introduce FlowAR, a general next scale prediction method featuring a streamlined scale design, where each subsequent scale is simply double the previous one. This eliminates the need for VAR's intricate multi-scale residual tokenizer and enables the use of any off-the-shelf Variational AutoEncoder (VAE). Our simplified design enhances generalization in next scale prediction and facilitates the integration of Flow Matching for high-quality image synthesis. We validate the effectiveness of FlowAR on the challenging ImageNet-256 benchmark, demonstrating superior generation performance compared to previous methods. Codes will be available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/FlowAR.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 19, 2024

Autoregressive Image Generation with Vision Full-view Prompt

In autoregressive (AR) image generation, models based on the 'next-token prediction' paradigm of LLMs have shown comparable performance to diffusion models by reducing inductive biases. However, directly applying LLMs to complex image generation can struggle with reconstructing the image's structure and details, impacting the generation's accuracy and stability. Additionally, the 'next-token prediction' paradigm in the AR model does not align with the contextual scanning and logical reasoning processes involved in human visual perception, limiting effective image generation. Prompt engineering, as a key technique for guiding LLMs, leverages specifically designed prompts to improve model performance on complex natural language processing (NLP) tasks, enhancing accuracy and stability of generation while maintaining contextual coherence and logical consistency, similar to human reasoning. Inspired by prompt engineering from the field of NLP, we propose Vision Full-view prompt (VF prompt) to enhance autoregressive image generation. Specifically, we design specialized image-related VF prompts for AR image generation to simulate the process of human image creation. This enhances contextual logic ability by allowing the model to first perceive overall distribution information before generating the image, and improve generation stability by increasing the inference steps. Compared to the AR method without VF prompts, our method shows outstanding performance and achieves an approximate improvement of 20%.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 24, 2025

TempAct: Advancing Temporal Plausibility in Autoregressive Video Generation via Planner-Executor RL

Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models enable low-latency streaming generation by synthesizing videos chunk by chunk with cached visual context, but this chunk-wise formulation makes temporal instruction following ambiguous. A single global prompt does not specify which sub-event should be realized in each chunk, while naively switching to step-wise prompts often leads to delayed reactions, blended step semantics, and error propagation across prompt transitions. These failures are difficult to address with supervised fine-tuning or distillation alone: SFT suffers from exposure bias, while rollout-based distillation still optimizes low-level denoising or teacher-distribution matching rather than directly enforcing action ordering and prompt-transition correctness. We address these challenges with TempAct, a planner--executor reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes temporal decomposition and step-conditioned execution for temporally plausible AR video generation. TempAct uses an LLM planner to explore span-aware step prompts that are executable by the video model, and trains an AR diffusion executor to follow these prompts under its own generated histories. Its key mechanism is hierarchical group exploration: candidate plans form planning groups, and each plan induces an execution group of multiple continuations from a shared visual context, enabling plan-level credit assignment for long-horizon temporal outcomes and executor-level credit assignment for prompt-switch behavior. We further design hierarchical rewards that combine plan-quality and full-video temporal feedback for the planner with local transition-level step-following rewards, aesthetic regularization, and KL constraints for the executor. Experiments on Self-Forcing and LongLive show that TempAct improves temporal consistency while preserving overall visual quality.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 25

Progress by Pieces: Test-Time Scaling for Autoregressive Image Generation

Recent visual autoregressive (AR) models have shown promising capabilities in text-to-image generation, operating in a manner similar to large language models. While test-time computation scaling has brought remarkable success in enabling reasoning-enhanced outputs for challenging natural language tasks, its adaptation to visual AR models remains unexplored and poses unique challenges. Naively applying test-time scaling strategies such as Best-of-N can be suboptimal: they consume full-length computation on erroneous generation trajectories, while the raster-scan decoding scheme lacks a blueprint of the entire canvas, limiting scaling benefits as only a few prompt-aligned candidates are generated. To address these, we introduce GridAR, a test-time scaling framework designed to elicit the best possible results from visual AR models. GridAR employs a grid-partitioned progressive generation scheme in which multiple partial candidates for the same position are generated within a canvas, infeasible ones are pruned early, and viable ones are fixed as anchors to guide subsequent decoding. Coupled with this, we present a layout-specified prompt reformulation strategy that inspects partial views to infer a feasible layout for satisfying the prompt. The reformulated prompt then guides subsequent image generation to mitigate the blueprint deficiency. Together, GridAR achieves higher-quality results under limited test-time scaling: with N=4, it even outperforms Best-of-N (N=8) by 14.4% on T2I-CompBench++ while reducing cost by 25.6%. It also generalizes to autoregressive image editing, showing comparable edit quality and a 13.9% gain in semantic preservation on PIE-Bench over larger-N baselines.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 26, 2025

NFIG: Autoregressive Image Generation with Next-Frequency Prediction

Autoregressive models have achieved promising results in natural language processing. However, for image generation tasks, they encounter substantial challenges in effectively capturing long-range dependencies, managing computational costs, and most crucially, defining meaningful autoregressive sequences that reflect natural image hierarchies. To address these issues, we present Next-Frequency Image Generation (NFIG), a novel framework that decomposes the image generation process into multiple frequency-guided stages. Our approach first generates low-frequency components to establish global structure with fewer tokens, then progressively adds higher-frequency details, following the natural spectral hierarchy of images. This principled autoregressive sequence not only improves the quality of generated images by better capturing true causal relationships between image components, but also significantly reduces computational overhead during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NFIG achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer steps, offering a more efficient solution for image generation, with 1.25times speedup compared to VAR-d20 while achieving better performance (FID: 2.81) on the ImageNet-256 benchmark. We hope that our insight of incorporating frequency-domain knowledge to guide autoregressive sequence design will shed light on future research. We will make our code publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

Next Forcing: Causal World Modeling with Multi-Chunk Prediction

Autoregressive video generation has emerged as a powerful paradigm for World Action Models (WAMs). However, existing approaches suffer from slow training convergence and limited converged accuracy, particularly at high frame rates, as the training supervision is confined to the current chunk without explicit signals about future dynamics; they also suffer from slow inference due to iterative video denoising. In this paper, we present Next Forcing, a multi-chunk prediction (MCP) framework for causal world modeling that enables faster training, higher accuracy, and accelerated inference. Inspired by multi-token prediction in large language models, Next Forcing introduces an MCP training objective that augments the main model with lightweight auxiliary MCP modules to simultaneously denoise video chunks at multiple future temporal horizons (next^1, next^2, next^3 chunks). These MCP modules form a causal chain across prediction depths, where intermediate features fused from multiple layers of the main model are leveraged to predict future dynamics, allowing near-future predictions to inform farther-future ones and providing dense multi-scale temporal supervision back to the main model. During training, the MCP modules significantly accelerate convergence and improve converged accuracy, especially at high frame rates: at 50 fps, Next Forcing achieves a 93.1% relative improvement over LingBot-VA at 5k training steps and 2.3x faster convergence, and establishes new state-of-the-art results on the RoboTwin benchmark (94.1/93.5% on Clean/Random). At inference, the MCP modules can be retained to predict the next video chunk in parallel with the current one, achieving 2x inference acceleration. Next Forcing also demonstrates significant improvements on PhyWorld, a benchmark evaluating adherence to physical laws in video generation, and over 50% FVD reduction on general video pretraining.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 8 2

Hierarchical Masked Autoregressive Models with Low-Resolution Token Pivots

Autoregressive models have emerged as a powerful generative paradigm for visual generation. The current de-facto standard of next token prediction commonly operates over a single-scale sequence of dense image tokens, and is incapable of utilizing global context especially for early tokens prediction. In this paper, we introduce a new autoregressive design to model a hierarchy from a few low-resolution image tokens to the typical dense image tokens, and delve into a thorough hierarchical dependency across multi-scale image tokens. Technically, we present a Hierarchical Masked Autoregressive models (Hi-MAR) that pivot on low-resolution image tokens to trigger hierarchical autoregressive modeling in a multi-phase manner. Hi-MAR learns to predict a few image tokens in low resolution, functioning as intermediary pivots to reflect global structure, in the first phase. Such pivots act as the additional guidance to strengthen the next autoregressive modeling phase by shaping global structural awareness of typical dense image tokens. A new Diffusion Transformer head is further devised to amplify the global context among all tokens for mask token prediction. Extensive evaluations on both class-conditional and text-to-image generation tasks demonstrate that Hi-MAR outperforms typical AR baselines, while requiring fewer computational costs. Code is available at https://github.com/HiDream-ai/himar.

  • 7 authors
·
May 26, 2025

Protein Autoregressive Modeling via Multiscale Structure Generation

We present protein autoregressive modeling (PAR), the first multi-scale autoregressive framework for protein backbone generation via coarse-to-fine next-scale prediction. Using the hierarchical nature of proteins, PAR generates structures that mimic sculpting a statue, forming a coarse topology and refining structural details over scales. To achieve this, PAR consists of three key components: (i) multi-scale downsampling operations that represent protein structures across multiple scales during training; (ii) an autoregressive transformer that encodes multi-scale information and produces conditional embeddings to guide structure generation; (iii) a flow-based backbone decoder that generates backbone atoms conditioned on these embeddings. Moreover, autoregressive models suffer from exposure bias, caused by the training and the generation procedure mismatch, and substantially degrades structure generation quality. We effectively alleviate this issue by adopting noisy context learning and scheduled sampling, enabling robust backbone generation. Notably, PAR exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, supporting flexible human-prompted conditional generation and motif scaffolding without requiring fine-tuning. On the unconditional generation benchmark, PAR effectively learns protein distributions and produces backbones of high design quality, and exhibits favorable scaling behavior. Together, these properties establish PAR as a promising framework for protein structure generation.

Unleashing the Potential of Large Language Models for Text-to-Image Generation through Autoregressive Representation Alignment

We present Autoregressive Representation Alignment (ARRA), a new training framework that unlocks global-coherent text-to-image generation in autoregressive LLMs without architectural changes. Unlike prior work that requires complex architectural redesigns, ARRA aligns LLM hidden states with visual representations from external visual foundational models via a global visual alignment loss and a hybrid token, <HYBNEXT>. This token enforces dual constraints: local next-token prediction and global semantic distillation, enabling LLMs to implicitly learn spatial and contextual coherence while retaining their original autoregressive paradigm. Extensive experiments validate ARRA's plug-and-play versatility. When training from text-generation-only LLMs or random initialization, ARRA reduces FID by 25.5% (MIMIC-CXR), 8.8% (DeepEyeNet), and 7.5% (ImageNet) for advanced autoregressive LLMs like Chameleon and LlamaGen, all without framework modifications. For domain adaption, ARRA aligns general-purpose LLMs with specialized models (e.g., BioMedCLIP), achieving an 18.6% FID reduction over direct fine-tuning on medical imaging (MIMIC-CXR). By demonstrating that training objective redesign -- not just architectural innovation -- can resolve cross-modal global coherence challenges, ARRA offers a complementary paradigm for advancing autoregressive models. Code and models will be released to advance autoregressive image generation.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025 1

PointNSP: Autoregressive 3D Point Cloud Generation with Next-Scale Level-of-Detail Prediction

Autoregressive point cloud generation has long lagged behind diffusion-based approaches in quality. The performance gap stems from the fact that autoregressive models impose an artificial ordering on inherently unordered point sets, forcing shape generation to proceed as a sequence of local predictions. This sequential bias emphasizes short-range continuity but undermines the model's capacity to capture long-range dependencies, hindering its ability to enforce global structural properties such as symmetry, consistent topology, and large-scale geometric regularities. Inspired by the level-of-detail (LOD) principle in shape modeling, we propose PointNSP, a coarse-to-fine generative framework that preserves global shape structure at low resolutions and progressively refines fine-grained geometry at higher scales through a next-scale prediction paradigm. This multi-scale factorization aligns the autoregressive objective with the permutation-invariant nature of point sets, enabling rich intra-scale interactions while avoiding brittle fixed orderings. Experiments on ShapeNet show that PointNSP establishes state-of-the-art (SOTA) generation quality for the first time within the autoregressive paradigm. In addition, it surpasses strong diffusion-based baselines in parameter, training, and inference efficiency. Finally, in dense generation with 8,192 points, PointNSP's advantages become even more pronounced, underscoring its scalability potential.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 11, 2025

A Controlled Candidate-Set Benchmark for Offline Satellite-Security Plan Decomposition

Some security-development settings require local models that map an objective to an ordered, checkable plan. We present a low-rank decomposition adapter and release a case-disjoint corpus with 24 authored decompositions and 83 derived next-step examples across 24 satellite-security cases. To prevent reference-plan leakage, prompts contain one objective and eight shuffled SPARTA candidates. The evaluation candidate sets are constructed with oracle inclusion of every reference technique, so this study measures selection from a controlled set, not retrieval. On six fixed cases and five decoding seeds, mean scores vary across adapters and prompted Qwen2.5 baselines; a separate greedy check over three adapter training seeds shows non-negligible training variance. A 24-fold greedy leave-one-case-out control at the two compact sizes likewise shows tradeoffs: at 1.5B, adapter precision is 0.583 against 0.480 for two-shot prompting, while recall is 0.586 against 0.660. Case-resampling intervals for adapter precision relative to the strongest prompted baseline cross zero at 1.5B and 7B. The adapter is also substantially more format-compliant, which prevents attributing all score differences to selection. Autoregressive next-step accuracy is 0.08, 0.06, and 0.29 at 0.5B, 1.5B, and 7B. We therefore offer the formulation, leakage-controlled dataset, reproducibility package, and descriptive analysis as a proof of concept, not evidence of a reliable stand-alone decomposition system or a general adapter advantage. A separate diagnostic tests contract reuse.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 28

Raster2Seq: Polygon Sequence Generation for Floorplan Reconstruction

Reconstructing a structured vector-graphics representation from a rasterized floorplan image is typically an important prerequisite for computational tasks involving floorplans such as automated understanding or CAD workflows. However, existing techniques struggle in faithfully generating the structure and semantics conveyed by complex floorplans that depict large indoor spaces with many rooms and a varying numbers of polygon corners. To this end, we propose Raster2Seq, framing floorplan reconstruction as a sequence-to-sequence task in which floorplan elements--such as rooms, windows, and doors--are represented as labeled polygon sequences that jointly encode geometry and semantics. Our approach introduces an autoregressive decoder that learns to predict the next corner conditioned on image features and previously generated corners using guidance from learnable anchors. These anchors represent spatial coordinates in image space, hence allowing for effectively directing the attention mechanism to focus on informative image regions. By embracing the autoregressive mechanism, our method offers flexibility in the output format, enabling for efficiently handling complex floorplans with numerous rooms and diverse polygon structures. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks such as Structure3D, CubiCasa5K, and Raster2Graph, while also demonstrating strong generalization to more challenging datasets like WAFFLE, which contain diverse room structures and complex geometric variations.

Visual Autoregressive Modeling for Instruction-Guided Image Editing

Recent advances in diffusion models have brought remarkable visual fidelity to instruction-guided image editing. However, their global denoising process inherently entangles the edited region with the entire image context, leading to unintended spurious modifications and compromised adherence to editing instructions. In contrast, autoregressive models offer a distinct paradigm by formulating image synthesis as a sequential process over discrete visual tokens. Their causal and compositional mechanism naturally circumvents the adherence challenges of diffusion-based methods. In this paper, we present VAREdit, a visual autoregressive (VAR) framework that reframes image editing as a next-scale prediction problem. Conditioned on source image features and text instructions, VAREdit generates multi-scale target features to achieve precise edits. A core challenge in this paradigm is how to effectively condition the source image tokens. We observe that finest-scale source features cannot effectively guide the prediction of coarser target features. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Scale-Aligned Reference (SAR) module, which injects scale-matched conditioning information into the first self-attention layer. VAREdit demonstrates significant advancements in both editing adherence and efficiency. On standard benchmarks, it outperforms leading diffusion-based methods by 30\%+ higher GPT-Balance score. Moreover, it completes a 512times512 editing in 1.2 seconds, making it 2.2times faster than the similarly sized UltraEdit. The models are available at https://github.com/HiDream-ai/VAREdit.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 21, 2025 3

Rethinking Training Dynamics in Scale-wise Autoregressive Generation

Recent advances in autoregressive (AR) generative models have produced increasingly powerful systems for media synthesis. Among them, next-scale prediction has emerged as a popular paradigm, where models generate images in a coarse-to-fine manner. However, scale-wise AR models suffer from exposure bias, which undermines generation quality. We identify two primary causes of this issue: (1) train-test mismatch, where the model must rely on its own imperfect predictions during inference, and (2) imbalance in scale-wise learning difficulty, where certain scales exhibit disproportionately higher optimization complexity. Through a comprehensive analysis of training dynamics, we propose Self-Autoregressive Refinement (SAR) to address these limitations. SAR introduces a Stagger-Scale Rollout (SSR) mechanism that performs lightweight autoregressive rollouts to expose the model to its own intermediate predictions, thereby aligning train-test patterns, and a complementary Contrastive Student-Forcing Loss (CSFL) that provides adequate supervision for self-generated contexts to ensure stable training. Experimental results show that applying SAR to pretrained AR models consistently improves generation quality with minimal computational overhead. For instance, SAR yields a 5.2% FID reduction on FlexVAR-d16 trained on ImageNet 256 within 10 epochs (5 hours on 32xA100 GPUs). Given its efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness, we expect SAR to serve as a reliable post-training method for visual autoregressive generation.

adobe-research Adobe Research
·
Dec 6, 2025 2

AME-TS: Anchored Mixture-of-Experts for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting models are increasingly scaled through large Transformer backbones, yet most existing approaches process all series through a shared dense computation path despite substantial heterogeneity in temporal structure. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) offers a natural alternative by enabling conditional computation, but standard MoE routing leaves expert specialization weakly identified and often unstable during downstream adaptation. We propose AME-TS, a structure-guided sparse time series foundation model that aligns expert routing with interpretable temporal structure. AME-TS first uses a lightweight regime predictor to estimate series-level descriptors, including forecastability, seasonality, trend, and sparsity, and maps them to a soft structural prior over experts. This series-level prior guides token-level routing during training, encouraging structure-aligned specialization. On the GIFT-Eval benchmark, AME-TS delivers a strong accuracy-efficiency tradeoff across model scales: it substantially outperforms existing time series foundation models at small model scales and remains competitive with the strongest models at larger scales, while activating substantially fewer parameters through sparse routing. We further show that AME-TS learns more interpretable routing geometry and substantially more stable expert specialization than standard MoE during fine-tuning on the M5 dataset. These results suggest that structure-aware routing is an effective and reliable way to realize the benefits of sparse expert models for time series forecasting.

  • 5 authors
·
May 23

Effectively Modeling Time Series with Simple Discrete State Spaces

Time series modeling is a well-established problem, which often requires that methods (1) expressively represent complicated dependencies, (2) forecast long horizons, and (3) efficiently train over long sequences. State-space models (SSMs) are classical models for time series, and prior works combine SSMs with deep learning layers for efficient sequence modeling. However, we find fundamental limitations with these prior approaches, proving their SSM representations cannot express autoregressive time series processes. We thus introduce SpaceTime, a new state-space time series architecture that improves all three criteria. For expressivity, we propose a new SSM parameterization based on the companion matrix -- a canonical representation for discrete-time processes -- which enables SpaceTime's SSM layers to learn desirable autoregressive processes. For long horizon forecasting, we introduce a "closed-loop" variation of the companion SSM, which enables SpaceTime to predict many future time-steps by generating its own layer-wise inputs. For efficient training and inference, we introduce an algorithm that reduces the memory and compute of a forward pass with the companion matrix. With sequence length ell and state-space size d, we go from O(d ell) na\"ively to O(d + ell). In experiments, our contributions lead to state-of-the-art results on extensive and diverse benchmarks, with best or second-best AUROC on 6 / 7 ECG and speech time series classification, and best MSE on 14 / 16 Informer forecasting tasks. Furthermore, we find SpaceTime (1) fits AR(p) processes that prior deep SSMs fail on, (2) forecasts notably more accurately on longer horizons than prior state-of-the-art, and (3) speeds up training on real-world ETTh1 data by 73% and 80% relative wall-clock time over Transformers and LSTMs.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 16, 2023

UniGenX: Unified Generation of Sequence and Structure with Autoregressive Diffusion

Unified generation of sequence and structure for scientific data (e.g., materials, molecules, proteins) is a critical task. Existing approaches primarily rely on either autoregressive sequence models or diffusion models, each offering distinct advantages and facing notable limitations. Autoregressive models, such as GPT, Llama, and Phi-4, have demonstrated remarkable success in natural language generation and have been extended to multimodal tasks (e.g., image, video, and audio) using advanced encoders like VQ-VAE to represent complex modalities as discrete sequences. However, their direct application to scientific domains is challenging due to the high precision requirements and the diverse nature of scientific data. On the other hand, diffusion models excel at generating high-dimensional scientific data, such as protein, molecule, and material structures, with remarkable accuracy. Yet, their inability to effectively model sequences limits their potential as general-purpose multimodal foundation models. To address these challenges, we propose UniGenX, a unified framework that combines autoregressive next-token prediction with conditional diffusion models. This integration leverages the strengths of autoregressive models to ease the training of conditional diffusion models, while diffusion-based generative heads enhance the precision of autoregressive predictions. We validate the effectiveness of UniGenX on material and small molecule generation tasks, achieving a significant leap in state-of-the-art performance for material crystal structure prediction and establishing new state-of-the-art results for small molecule structure prediction, de novo design, and conditional generation. Notably, UniGenX demonstrates significant improvements, especially in handling long sequences for complex structures, showcasing its efficacy as a versatile tool for scientific data generation.

  • 25 authors
·
Mar 9, 2025

PnP-U3D: Plug-and-Play 3D Framework Bridging Autoregression and Diffusion for Unified Understanding and Generation

The rapid progress of large multimodal models has inspired efforts toward unified frameworks that couple understanding and generation. While such paradigms have shown remarkable success in 2D, extending them to 3D remains largely underexplored. Existing attempts to unify 3D tasks under a single autoregressive (AR) paradigm lead to significant performance degradation due to forced signal quantization and prohibitive training cost. Our key insight is that the essential challenge lies not in enforcing a unified autoregressive paradigm, but in enabling effective information interaction between generation and understanding while minimally compromising their inherent capabilities and leveraging pretrained models to reduce training cost. Guided by this perspective, we present the first unified framework for 3D understanding and generation that combines autoregression with diffusion. Specifically, we adopt an autoregressive next-token prediction paradigm for 3D understanding, and a continuous diffusion paradigm for 3D generation. A lightweight transformer bridges the feature space of large language models and the conditional space of 3D diffusion models, enabling effective cross-modal information exchange while preserving the priors learned by standalone models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse 3D understanding and generation benchmarks, while also excelling in 3D editing tasks. These results highlight the potential of unified AR+diffusion models as a promising direction for building more general-purpose 3D intelligence.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 3

ControlAR: Controllable Image Generation with Autoregressive Models

Autoregressive (AR) models have reformulated image generation as next-token prediction, demonstrating remarkable potential and emerging as strong competitors to diffusion models. However, control-to-image generation, akin to ControlNet, remains largely unexplored within AR models. Although a natural approach, inspired by advancements in Large Language Models, is to tokenize control images into tokens and prefill them into the autoregressive model before decoding image tokens, it still falls short in generation quality compared to ControlNet and suffers from inefficiency. To this end, we introduce ControlAR, an efficient and effective framework for integrating spatial controls into autoregressive image generation models. Firstly, we explore control encoding for AR models and propose a lightweight control encoder to transform spatial inputs (e.g., canny edges or depth maps) into control tokens. Then ControlAR exploits the conditional decoding method to generate the next image token conditioned on the per-token fusion between control and image tokens, similar to positional encodings. Compared to prefilling tokens, using conditional decoding significantly strengthens the control capability of AR models but also maintains the model's efficiency. Furthermore, the proposed ControlAR surprisingly empowers AR models with arbitrary-resolution image generation via conditional decoding and specific controls. Extensive experiments can demonstrate the controllability of the proposed ControlAR for the autoregressive control-to-image generation across diverse inputs, including edges, depths, and segmentation masks. Furthermore, both quantitative and qualitative results indicate that ControlAR surpasses previous state-of-the-art controllable diffusion models, e.g., ControlNet++. Code, models, and demo will soon be available at https://github.com/hustvl/ControlAR.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024 2

TSGym: Design Choices for Deep Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

Recently, deep learning has driven significant advancements in multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) tasks. However, much of the current research in MTSF tends to evaluate models from a holistic perspective, which obscures the individual contributions and leaves critical issues unaddressed. Adhering to the current modeling paradigms, this work bridges these gaps by systematically decomposing deep MTSF methods into their core, fine-grained components like series-patching tokenization, channel-independent strategy, attention modules, or even Large Language Models and Time-series Foundation Models. Through extensive experiments and component-level analysis, our work offers more profound insights than previous benchmarks that typically discuss models as a whole. Furthermore, we propose a novel automated solution called TSGym for MTSF tasks. Unlike traditional hyperparameter tuning, neural architecture searching or fixed model selection, TSGym performs fine-grained component selection and automated model construction, which enables the creation of more effective solutions tailored to diverse time series data, therefore enhancing model transferability across different data sources and robustness against distribution shifts. Extensive experiments indicate that TSGym significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art MTSF and AutoML methods. All code is publicly available on https://github.com/SUFE-AILAB/TSGym.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 21, 2025

AutoTimes: Autoregressive Time Series Forecasters via Large Language Models

Foundation models of time series have not been fully developed due to the limited availability of time series corpora and the underexploration of scalable pre-training. Based on the similar sequential formulation of time series and natural language, increasing research demonstrates the feasibility of leveraging large language models (LLM) for time series. Nevertheless, the inherent autoregressive property and decoder-only architecture of LLMs have not been fully considered, resulting in insufficient utilization of LLM abilities. To fully revitalize the general-purpose token transition and multi-step generation capability of large language models, we propose AutoTimes to repurpose LLMs as autoregressive time series forecasters, which projects time series into the embedding space of language tokens and autoregressively generates future predictions with arbitrary lengths. Compatible with any decoder-only LLMs, the consequent forecaster exhibits the flexibility of the lookback length and scalability with larger LLMs. Further, we formulate time series as prompts, extending the context for prediction beyond the lookback window, termed in-context forecasting. By introducing LLM-embedded textual timestamps, AutoTimes can utilize chronological information to align multivariate time series. Empirically, AutoTimes achieves state-of-the-art with 0.1% trainable parameters and over 5times training/inference speedup compared to advanced LLM-based forecasters. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/AutoTimes.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 4, 2024

Are We Ready for RL in Text-to-3D Generation? A Progressive Investigation

Reinforcement learning (RL), earlier proven to be effective in large language and multi-modal models, has been successfully extended to enhance 2D image generation recently. However, applying RL to 3D generation remains largely unexplored due to the higher spatial complexity of 3D objects, which require globally consistent geometry and fine-grained local textures. This makes 3D generation significantly sensitive to reward designs and RL algorithms. To address these challenges, we conduct the first systematic study of RL for text-to-3D autoregressive generation across several dimensions. (1) Reward designs: We evaluate reward dimensions and model choices, showing that alignment with human preference is crucial, and that general multi-modal models provide robust signal for 3D attributes. (2) RL algorithms: We study GRPO variants, highlighting the effectiveness of token-level optimization, and further investigate the scaling of training data and iterations. (3) Text-to-3D Benchmarks: Since existing benchmarks fail to measure implicit reasoning abilities in 3D generation models, we introduce MME-3DR. (4) Advanced RL paradigms: Motivated by the natural hierarchy of 3D generation, we propose Hi-GRPO, which optimizes the global-to-local hierarchical 3D generation through dedicated reward ensembles. Based on these insights, we develop AR3D-R1, the first RL-enhanced text-to-3D model, expert from coarse shape to texture refinement. We hope this study provides insights into RL-driven reasoning for 3D generation. Code is released at https://github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/3DGen-R1.

ShanghaiAiLab shanghai ailab
·
Dec 11, 2025 3

ArtLLM: Generating Articulated Assets via 3D LLM

Creating interactive digital environments for gaming, robotics, and simulation relies on articulated 3D objects whose functionality emerges from their part geometry and kinematic structure. However, existing approaches remain fundamentally limited: optimization-based reconstruction methods require slow, per-object joint fitting and typically handle only simple, single-joint objects, while retrieval-based methods assemble parts from a fixed library, leading to repetitive geometry and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we introduce ArtLLM, a novel framework for generating high-quality articulated assets directly from complete 3D meshes. At its core is a 3D multimodal large language model trained on a large-scale articulation dataset curated from both existing articulation datasets and procedurally generated objects. Unlike prior work, ArtLLM autoregressively predicts a variable number of parts and joints, inferring their kinematic structure in a unified manner from the object's point cloud. This articulation-aware layout then conditions a 3D generative model to synthesize high-fidelity part geometries. Experiments on the PartNet-Mobility dataset show that ArtLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both part layout accuracy and joint prediction, while generalizing robustly to real-world objects. Finally, we demonstrate its utility in constructing digital twins, highlighting its potential for scalable robot learning.

ACDiT: Interpolating Autoregressive Conditional Modeling and Diffusion Transformer

The recent surge of interest in comprehensive multimodal models has necessitated the unification of diverse modalities. However, the unification suffers from disparate methodologies. Continuous visual generation necessitates the full-sequence diffusion-based approach, despite its divergence from the autoregressive modeling in the text domain. We posit that autoregressive modeling, i.e., predicting the future based on past deterministic experience, remains crucial in developing both a visual generation model and a potential unified multimodal model. In this paper, we explore an interpolation between the autoregressive modeling and full-parameters diffusion to model visual information. At its core, we present ACDiT, an Autoregressive blockwise Conditional Diffusion Transformer, where the block size of diffusion, i.e., the size of autoregressive units, can be flexibly adjusted to interpolate between token-wise autoregression and full-sequence diffusion. ACDiT is easy to implement, as simple as creating a Skip-Causal Attention Mask (SCAM) during training. During inference, the process iterates between diffusion denoising and autoregressive decoding that can make full use of KV-Cache. We verify the effectiveness of ACDiT on image and video generation tasks. We also demonstrate that benefitted from autoregressive modeling, ACDiT can be seamlessly used in visual understanding tasks despite being trained on the diffusion objective. The analysis of the trade-off between autoregressive modeling and diffusion demonstrates the potential of ACDiT to be used in long-horizon visual generation tasks. These strengths make it promising as the backbone of future unified models.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 10, 2024 2

AlphaBlock: Embodied Finetuning for Vision-Language Reasoning in Robot Manipulation

We propose a novel framework for learning high-level cognitive capabilities in robot manipulation tasks, such as making a smiley face using building blocks. These tasks often involve complex multi-step reasoning, presenting significant challenges due to the limited paired data connecting human instructions (e.g., making a smiley face) and robot actions (e.g., end-effector movement). Existing approaches relieve this challenge by adopting an open-loop paradigm decomposing high-level instructions into simple sub-task plans, and executing them step-by-step using low-level control models. However, these approaches are short of instant observations in multi-step reasoning, leading to sub-optimal results. To address this issue, we propose to automatically collect a cognitive robot dataset by Large Language Models (LLMs). The resulting dataset AlphaBlock consists of 35 comprehensive high-level tasks of multi-step text plans and paired observation sequences. To enable efficient data acquisition, we employ elaborated multi-round prompt designs that effectively reduce the burden of extensive human involvement. We further propose a closed-loop multi-modal embodied planning model that autoregressively generates plans by taking image observations as input. To facilitate effective learning, we leverage MiniGPT-4 with a frozen visual encoder and LLM, and finetune additional vision adapter and Q-former to enable fine-grained spatial perception for manipulation tasks. We conduct experiments to verify the superiority over existing open and closed-loop methods, and achieve a significant increase in success rate by 21.4% and 14.5% over ChatGPT and GPT-4 based robot tasks. Real-world demos are shown in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAzID1_qQk .

  • 7 authors
·
May 30, 2023

Insertion Language Models: Sequence Generation with Arbitrary-Position Insertions

Autoregressive models (ARMs), which predict subsequent tokens one-by-one ``from left to right,'' have achieved significant success across a wide range of sequence generation tasks. However, they struggle to accurately represent sequences that require satisfying sophisticated constraints or whose sequential dependencies are better addressed by out-of-order generation. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) address some of these limitations, but the process of unmasking multiple tokens simultaneously in MDMs can introduce incoherences, and MDMs cannot handle arbitrary infilling constraints when the number of tokens to be filled in is not known in advance. In this work, we introduce Insertion Language Models (ILMs), which learn to insert tokens at arbitrary positions in a sequence -- that is, they select jointly both the position and the vocabulary element to be inserted. By inserting tokens one at a time, ILMs can represent strong dependencies between tokens, and their ability to generate sequences in arbitrary order allows them to accurately model sequences where token dependencies do not follow a left-to-right sequential structure. To train ILMs, we propose a tailored network parameterization and use a simple denoising objective. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that ILMs outperform both ARMs and MDMs on common planning tasks. Furthermore, we show that ILMs outperform MDMs and perform on par with ARMs in an unconditional text generation task while offering greater flexibility than MDMs in arbitrary-length text infilling.

  • 6 authors
·
May 8, 2025

CubeComposer: Spatio-Temporal Autoregressive 4K 360° Video Generation from Perspective Video

Generating high-quality 360° panoramic videos from perspective input is one of the crucial applications for virtual reality (VR), whereby high-resolution videos are especially important for immersive experience. Existing methods are constrained by computational limitations of vanilla diffusion models, only supporting leq 1K resolution native generation and relying on suboptimal post super-resolution to increase resolution. We introduce CubeComposer, a novel spatio-temporal autoregressive diffusion model that natively generates 4K-resolution 360° videos. By decomposing videos into cubemap representations with six faces, CubeComposer autoregressively synthesizes content in a well-planned spatio-temporal order, reducing memory demands while enabling high-resolution output. Specifically, to address challenges in multi-dimensional autoregression, we propose: (1) a spatio-temporal autoregressive strategy that orchestrates 360° video generation across cube faces and time windows for coherent synthesis; (2) a cube face context management mechanism, equipped with a sparse context attention design to improve efficiency; and (3) continuity-aware techniques, including cube-aware positional encoding, padding, and blending to eliminate boundary seams. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CubeComposer outperforms state-of-the-art methods in native resolution and visual quality, supporting practical VR application scenarios. Project page: https://lg-li.github.io/project/cubecomposer

Beyond Next-Token: Next-X Prediction for Autoregressive Visual Generation

Autoregressive (AR) modeling, known for its next-token prediction paradigm, underpins state-of-the-art language and visual generative models. Traditionally, a ``token'' is treated as the smallest prediction unit, often a discrete symbol in language or a quantized patch in vision. However, the optimal token definition for 2D image structures remains an open question. Moreover, AR models suffer from exposure bias, where teacher forcing during training leads to error accumulation at inference. In this paper, we propose xAR, a generalized AR framework that extends the notion of a token to an entity X, which can represent an individual patch token, a cell (a ktimes k grouping of neighboring patches), a subsample (a non-local grouping of distant patches), a scale (coarse-to-fine resolution), or even a whole image. Additionally, we reformulate discrete token classification as continuous entity regression, leveraging flow-matching methods at each AR step. This approach conditions training on noisy entities instead of ground truth tokens, leading to Noisy Context Learning, which effectively alleviates exposure bias. As a result, xAR offers two key advantages: (1) it enables flexible prediction units that capture different contextual granularity and spatial structures, and (2) it mitigates exposure bias by avoiding reliance on teacher forcing. On ImageNet-256 generation benchmark, our base model, xAR-B (172M), outperforms DiT-XL/SiT-XL (675M) while achieving 20times faster inference. Meanwhile, xAR-H sets a new state-of-the-art with an FID of 1.24, running 2.2times faster than the previous best-performing model without relying on vision foundation modules (\eg, DINOv2) or advanced guidance interval sampling.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 27, 2025 2

MoVE: Mixture of Value Embeddings -- A New Axis for Scaling Parametric Memory in Autoregressive Models

Autoregressive sequence modeling stands as the cornerstone of modern Generative AI, powering results across diverse modalities ranging from text generation to image generation. However, a fundamental limitation of this paradigm is the rigid structural coupling of model capacity to computational cost: expanding a model's parametric memory -- its repository of factual knowledge or visual patterns -- traditionally requires deepening or widening the network, which incurs a proportional rise in active FLOPs. In this work, we introduce MoVE (Mixture of Value Embeddings), a mechanism that breaks this coupling and establishes a new axis for scaling capacity. MoVE decouples memory from compute by introducing a global bank of learnable value embeddings shared across all attention layers. For every step in the sequence, the model employs a differentiable soft gating mechanism to dynamically mix retrieved concepts from this bank into the standard value projection. This architecture allows parametric memory to be scaled independently of network depth by simply increasing the number of embedding slots. We validate MoVE through strictly controlled experiments on two representative applications of autoregressive modeling: Text Generation and Image Generation. In both domains, MoVE yields consistent performance improvements over standard and layer-wise memory baselines, enabling the construction of "memory-dense" models that achieve lower perplexity and higher fidelity than their dense counterparts at comparable compute budgets.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 30

ARFlow: Autogressive Flow with Hybrid Linear Attention

Flow models are effective at progressively generating realistic images, but they generally struggle to capture long-range dependencies during the generation process as they compress all the information from previous time steps into a single corrupted image. To address this limitation, we propose integrating autoregressive modeling -- known for its excellence in modeling complex, high-dimensional joint probability distributions -- into flow models. During training, at each step, we construct causally-ordered sequences by sampling multiple images from the same semantic category and applying different levels of noise, where images with higher noise levels serve as causal predecessors to those with lower noise levels. This design enables the model to learn broader category-level variations while maintaining proper causal relationships in the flow process. During generation, the model autoregressively conditions the previously generated images from earlier denoising steps, forming a contextual and coherent generation trajectory. Additionally, we design a customized hybrid linear attention mechanism tailored to our modeling approach to enhance computational efficiency. Our approach, termed ARFlow, under 400k training steps, achieves 14.08 FID scores on ImageNet at 128 * 128 without classifier-free guidance, reaching 4.34 FID with classifier-free guidance 1.5, significantly outperforming the previous flow-based model SiT's 9.17 FID. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our modeling strategy and chunk-wise attention design.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 27, 2025

ABC: Any-Subset Autoregression via Non-Markovian Diffusion Bridges in Continuous Time and Space

Generating continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic processes (e.g., videos, weather forecasts) conditioned on partial observations (e.g., first and last frames) is a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches, (e.g., diffusion models), suffer from key limitations: (1) noise-to-data evolution fails to capture structural similarity between states close in physical time and has unstable integration in low-step regimes; (2) random noise injected is insensitive to the physical process's time elapsed, resulting in incorrect dynamics; (3) they overlook conditioning on arbitrary subsets of states (e.g., irregularly sampled timesteps, future observations). We propose ABC: Any-Subset Autoregressive Models via Non-Markovian Diffusion Bridges in Continuous Time and Space. Crucially, we model the process with one continual SDE whose time variable and intermediate states track the real time and process states. This has provable advantages: (1) the starting point for generating future states is the already-close previous state, rather than uninformative noise; (2) random noise injection scales with physical time elapsed, encouraging physically plausible dynamics with similar time-adjacent states. We derive SDE dynamics via changes-of-measure on path space, yielding another advantage: (3) path-dependent conditioning on arbitrary subsets of the state history and/or future. To learn these dynamics, we derive a path- and time-dependent extension of denoising score matching. Our experiments show ABC's superiority to competing methods on multiple domains, including video generation and weather forecasting.

  • 6 authors
·
May 4

OctGPT: Octree-based Multiscale Autoregressive Models for 3D Shape Generation

Autoregressive models have achieved remarkable success across various domains, yet their performance in 3D shape generation lags significantly behind that of diffusion models. In this paper, we introduce OctGPT, a novel multiscale autoregressive model for 3D shape generation that dramatically improves the efficiency and performance of prior 3D autoregressive approaches, while rivaling or surpassing state-of-the-art diffusion models. Our method employs a serialized octree representation to efficiently capture the hierarchical and spatial structures of 3D shapes. Coarse geometry is encoded via octree structures, while fine-grained details are represented by binary tokens generated using a vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQVAE), transforming 3D shapes into compact multiscale binary sequences suitable for autoregressive prediction. To address the computational challenges of handling long sequences, we incorporate octree-based transformers enhanced with 3D rotary positional encodings, scale-specific embeddings, and token-parallel generation schemes. These innovations reduce training time by 13 folds and generation time by 69 folds, enabling the efficient training of high-resolution 3D shapes, e.g.,1024^3, on just four NVIDIA 4090 GPUs only within days. OctGPT showcases exceptional versatility across various tasks, including text-, sketch-, and image-conditioned generation, as well as scene-level synthesis involving multiple objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OctGPT accelerates convergence and improves generation quality over prior autoregressive methods, offering a new paradigm for high-quality, scalable 3D content creation.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025

Autoregressive Hidden Markov Models with partial knowledge on latent space applied to aero-engines prognostics

[This paper was initially published in PHME conference in 2016, selected for further publication in International Journal of Prognostics and Health Management.] This paper describes an Autoregressive Partially-hidden Markov model (ARPHMM) for fault detection and prognostics of equipments based on sensors' data. It is a particular dynamic Bayesian network that allows to represent the dynamics of a system by means of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and an autoregressive (AR) process. The Markov chain assumes that the system is switching back and forth between internal states while the AR process ensures a temporal coherence on sensor measurements. A sound learning procedure of standard ARHMM based on maximum likelihood allows to iteratively estimate all parameters simultaneously. This paper suggests a modification of the learning procedure considering that one may have prior knowledge about the structure which becomes partially hidden. The integration of the prior is based on the Theory of Weighted Distributions which is compatible with the Expectation-Maximization algorithm in the sense that the convergence properties are still satisfied. We show how to apply this model to estimate the remaining useful life based on health indicators. The autoregressive parameters can indeed be used for prediction while the latent structure can be used to get information about the degradation level. The interest of the proposed method for prognostics and health assessment is demonstrated on CMAPSS datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
May 1, 2021

Delving into RL for Image Generation with CoT: A Study on DPO vs. GRPO

Recent advancements underscore the significant role of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in enhancing the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Two prominent RL algorithms, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), are central to these developments, showcasing different pros and cons. Autoregressive image generation, also interpretable as a sequential CoT reasoning process, presents unique challenges distinct from LLM-based CoT reasoning. These encompass ensuring text-image consistency, improving image aesthetic quality, and designing sophisticated reward models, rather than relying on simpler rule-based rewards. While recent efforts have extended RL to this domain, these explorations typically lack an in-depth analysis of the domain-specific challenges and the characteristics of different RL strategies. To bridge this gap, we provide the first comprehensive investigation of the GRPO and DPO algorithms in autoregressive image generation, evaluating their in-domain performance and out-of-domain generalization, while scrutinizing the impact of different reward models on their respective capabilities. Our findings reveal that GRPO and DPO exhibit distinct advantages, and crucially, that reward models possessing stronger intrinsic generalization capabilities potentially enhance the generalization potential of the applied RL algorithms. Furthermore, we systematically explore three prevalent scaling strategies to enhance both their in-domain and out-of-domain proficiency, deriving unique insights into efficiently scaling performance for each paradigm. We hope our study paves a new path for inspiring future work on developing more effective RL algorithms to achieve robust CoT reasoning in the realm of autoregressive image generation. Code is released at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Image-Generation-CoT

  • 8 authors
·
May 22, 2025

(1D) Ordered Tokens Enable Efficient Test-Time Search

Tokenization is a key component of autoregressive (AR) generative models, converting raw data into more manageable units for modeling. Commonly, tokens describe local information, such as regions of pixels in images or word pieces in text, and AR generation predicts these tokens in a fixed order. A worthwhile question is whether token structures affect the ability to steer the generation through test-time search, where multiple candidate generations are explored and evaluated by a verifier. Using image generation as our testbed, we hypothesize that recent 1D ordered tokenizers with coarse-to-fine structure can be more amenable to search than classical 2D grid structures. This is rooted in the fact that the intermediate states in coarse-to-fine sequences carry semantic meaning that verifiers can reliably evaluate, enabling effective steering during generation. Through controlled experiments, we find that AR models trained on coarse-to-fine ordered tokens exhibit improved test-time scaling behavior compared to grid-based counterparts. Moreover, we demonstrate that, thanks to the ordered structure, pure test-time search over token sequences (i.e., without training an AR model) can perform training-free text-to-image generation when guided by an image-text verifier. Beyond this, we systematically study how classical search algorithms (best-of-N, beam search, lookahead search) interact with different token structures, as well as the role of different verifiers and AR priors. Our results highlight the impact of token structure on inference-time scalability and provide practical guidance for test-time scaling in AR models.

EPFL-VILAB EPFL VILAB
·
Apr 15 2

Continuous Interaction Diffusion: A Diffusion-Native Runtime for Asynchronous Tool-Augmented Reasoning

Large language models increasingly rely on external tools to access up-to-date information, perform computation, and interact with the outside world. For autoregressive models, tool use naturally fits the generation process: the model emits a tool call, waits for the result, and then continues generating. Diffusion language models (dLLMs), however, reason by repeatedly refining many parts of their output in parallel, making this stop-and-resume interaction pattern unnecessarily restrictive. It can force tool decisions before the model's reasoning has stabilized, delay useful observations until a discrete call finishes, and introduce redundant refinement and tool execution, potentially hurting both task accuracy and inference efficiency. We introduce Continuous Interaction Diffusion (CID), a diffusion-native model--runtime architecture that integrates tool interaction into iterative denoising. CID separates a model-read-only fact channel, a thought channel represented by a Typed Cognitive Tensor, and a display channel. Information needs can emerge before a textual or JSON call is fully serialized, allowing perceptual bindings to launch external reads while denoising continues. Returned results are projected into the evolving thought state and can revise earlier cognition and display regions. Persistent bindings reuse static results without repeated external execution and refresh changing sources when needed. CID is designed to expose evidence earlier, overlap tool latency with model computation, reduce duplicate external work, and preserve useful computation after new evidence arrives. We formalize the architecture, runtime, and training objectives, and define an evaluation protocol for task quality and end-to-end efficiency. This first paper focuses on read-only tools and makes no empirical performance claims.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 10

World Modeling with Probabilistic Structure Integration

We present Probabilistic Structure Integration (PSI), a system for learning richly controllable and flexibly promptable world models from data. PSI consists of a three-step cycle. The first step, Probabilistic prediction, involves building a probabilistic graphical model Psi of the data, in the form of a random-access autoregressive sequence model. Psi supports a complete set of learned conditional distributions describing the dependence of any variables in the data on any other set of variables. In step 2, Structure extraction, we show how to extract underlying low-dimensional properties in the data, corresponding to a diverse set of meaningful "intermediate structures", in a zero-shot fashion via causal inference on Psi. Step 3, Integration, completes the cycle by converting these structures into new token types that are then continually mixed back into the training diet as conditioning signals and prediction targets. Each such cycle augments the capabilities of Psi, both allowing it to model the underlying data better, and creating new control handles -- akin to an LLM-like universal prompting language. We train an instance of Psi on 1.4 trillion tokens of internet video data; we use it to perform a variety of useful video prediction and understanding inferences; we extract state-of-the-art optical flow, self-supervised depth and object segmentation; and we use these structures to support a full cycle of predictive improvements.

  • 16 authors
·
Sep 10, 2025 4

Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting

Extending the forecasting time is a critical demand for real applications, such as extreme weather early warning and long-term energy consumption planning. This paper studies the long-term forecasting problem of time series. Prior Transformer-based models adopt various self-attention mechanisms to discover the long-range dependencies. However, intricate temporal patterns of the long-term future prohibit the model from finding reliable dependencies. Also, Transformers have to adopt the sparse versions of point-wise self-attentions for long series efficiency, resulting in the information utilization bottleneck. Going beyond Transformers, we design Autoformer as a novel decomposition architecture with an Auto-Correlation mechanism. We break with the pre-processing convention of series decomposition and renovate it as a basic inner block of deep models. This design empowers Autoformer with progressive decomposition capacities for complex time series. Further, inspired by the stochastic process theory, we design the Auto-Correlation mechanism based on the series periodicity, which conducts the dependencies discovery and representation aggregation at the sub-series level. Auto-Correlation outperforms self-attention in both efficiency and accuracy. In long-term forecasting, Autoformer yields state-of-the-art accuracy, with a 38% relative improvement on six benchmarks, covering five practical applications: energy, traffic, economics, weather and disease. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/Autoformer.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 24, 2021

T3Time: Tri-Modal Time Series Forecasting via Adaptive Multi-Head Alignment and Residual Fusion

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) seeks to model temporal dynamics among variables to predict future trends. Transformer-based models and large language models (LLMs) have shown promise due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and patterns. However, current methods often rely on rigid inductive biases, ignore intervariable interactions, or apply static fusion strategies that limit adaptability across forecast horizons. These limitations create bottlenecks in capturing nuanced, horizon-specific relationships in time-series data. To solve this problem, we propose T3Time, a novel trimodal framework consisting of time, spectral, and prompt branches, where the dedicated frequency encoding branch captures the periodic structures along with a gating mechanism that learns prioritization between temporal and spectral features based on the prediction horizon. We also proposed a mechanism which adaptively aggregates multiple cross-modal alignment heads by dynamically weighting the importance of each head based on the features. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average reduction of 3.28% in MSE and 2.29% in MAE. Furthermore, it shows strong generalization in few-shot learning settings: with 5% training data, we see a reduction in MSE and MAE by 4.13% and 1.91%, respectively; and with 10% data, by 3.62% and 1.98% on average. Code - https://github.com/monaf-chowdhury/T3Time/

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025

TeleWorld: Towards Dynamic Multimodal Synthesis with a 4D World Model

World models aim to endow AI systems with the ability to represent, generate, and interact with dynamic environments in a coherent and temporally consistent manner. While recent video generation models have demonstrated impressive visual quality, they remain limited in real-time interaction, long-horizon consistency, and persistent memory of dynamic scenes, hindering their evolution into practical world models. In this report, we present TeleWorld, a real-time multimodal 4D world modeling framework that unifies video generation, dynamic scene reconstruction, and long-term world memory within a closed-loop system. TeleWorld introduces a novel generation-reconstruction-guidance paradigm, where generated video streams are continuously reconstructed into a dynamic 4D spatio-temporal representation, which in turn guides subsequent generation to maintain spatial, temporal, and physical consistency. To support long-horizon generation with low latency, we employ an autoregressive diffusion-based video model enhanced with Macro-from-Micro Planning (MMPL)--a hierarchical planning method that reduces error accumulation from frame-level to segment-level-alongside efficient Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), enabling real-time synthesis under practical computational budgets. Our approach achieves seamless integration of dynamic object modeling and static scene representation within a unified 4D framework, advancing world models toward practical, interactive, and computationally accessible systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TeleWorld achieves strong performance in both static and dynamic world understanding, long-term consistency, and real-time generation efficiency, positioning it as a practical step toward interactive, memory-enabled world models for multimodal generation and embodied intelligence.

  • 27 authors
·
Dec 31, 2025

HMAR: Efficient Hierarchical Masked Auto-Regressive Image Generation

Visual Auto-Regressive modeling (VAR) has shown promise in bridging the speed and quality gap between autoregressive image models and diffusion models. VAR reformulates autoregressive modeling by decomposing an image into successive resolution scales. During inference, an image is generated by predicting all the tokens in the next (higher-resolution) scale, conditioned on all tokens in all previous (lower-resolution) scales. However, this formulation suffers from reduced image quality due to the parallel generation of all tokens in a resolution scale; has sequence lengths scaling superlinearly in image resolution; and requires retraining to change the sampling schedule. We introduce Hierarchical Masked Auto-Regressive modeling (HMAR), a new image generation algorithm that alleviates these issues using next-scale prediction and masked prediction to generate high-quality images with fast sampling. HMAR reformulates next-scale prediction as a Markovian process, wherein the prediction of each resolution scale is conditioned only on tokens in its immediate predecessor instead of the tokens in all predecessor resolutions. When predicting a resolution scale, HMAR uses a controllable multi-step masked generation procedure to generate a subset of the tokens in each step. On ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512 benchmarks, HMAR models match or outperform parameter-matched VAR, diffusion, and autoregressive baselines. We develop efficient IO-aware block-sparse attention kernels that allow HMAR to achieve faster training and inference times over VAR by over 2.5x and 1.75x respectively, as well as over 3x lower inference memory footprint. Finally, HMAR yields additional flexibility over VAR; its sampling schedule can be changed without further training, and it can be applied to image editing tasks in a zero-shot manner.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models

Time series forecasting holds significant importance in many real-world dynamic systems and has been extensively studied. Unlike natural language process (NLP) and computer vision (CV), where a single large model can tackle multiple tasks, models for time series forecasting are often specialized, necessitating distinct designs for different tasks and applications. While pre-trained foundation models have made impressive strides in NLP and CV, their development in time series domains has been constrained by data sparsity. Recent studies have revealed that large language models (LLMs) possess robust pattern recognition and reasoning abilities over complex sequences of tokens. However, the challenge remains in effectively aligning the modalities of time series data and natural language to leverage these capabilities. In this work, we present Time-LLM, a reprogramming framework to repurpose LLMs for general time series forecasting with the backbone language models kept intact. We begin by reprogramming the input time series with text prototypes before feeding it into the frozen LLM to align the two modalities. To augment the LLM's ability to reason with time series data, we propose Prompt-as-Prefix (PaP), which enriches the input context and directs the transformation of reprogrammed input patches. The transformed time series patches from the LLM are finally projected to obtain the forecasts. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that Time-LLM is a powerful time series learner that outperforms state-of-the-art, specialized forecasting models. Moreover, Time-LLM excels in both few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

Probabilistic AutoRegressive Neural Networks for Accurate Long-range Forecasting

Forecasting time series data is a critical area of research with applications spanning from stock prices to early epidemic prediction. While numerous statistical and machine learning methods have been proposed, real-life prediction problems often require hybrid solutions that bridge classical forecasting approaches and modern neural network models. In this study, we introduce the Probabilistic AutoRegressive Neural Networks (PARNN), capable of handling complex time series data exhibiting non-stationarity, nonlinearity, non-seasonality, long-range dependence, and chaotic patterns. PARNN is constructed by improving autoregressive neural networks (ARNN) using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) feedback error, combining the explainability, scalability, and "white-box-like" prediction behavior of both models. Notably, the PARNN model provides uncertainty quantification through prediction intervals, setting it apart from advanced deep learning tools. Through comprehensive computational experiments, we evaluate the performance of PARNN against standard statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models, including Transformers, NBeats, and DeepAR. Diverse real-world datasets from macroeconomics, tourism, epidemiology, and other domains are employed for short-term, medium-term, and long-term forecasting evaluations. Our results demonstrate the superiority of PARNN across various forecast horizons, surpassing the state-of-the-art forecasters. The proposed PARNN model offers a valuable hybrid solution for accurate long-range forecasting. By effectively capturing the complexities present in time series data, it outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy and reliability. The ability to quantify uncertainty through prediction intervals further enhances the model's usefulness in decision-making processes.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 1, 2022

SoulX-LiveAct: Towards Hour-Scale Real-Time Human Animation with Neighbor Forcing and ConvKV Memory

Autoregressive (AR) diffusion models offer a promising framework for sequential generation tasks such as video synthesis by combining diffusion modeling with causal inference. Although they support streaming generation, existing AR diffusion methods struggle to scale efficiently. In this paper, we identify two key challenges in hour-scale real-time human animation. First, most forcing strategies propagate sample-level representations with mismatched diffusion states, causing inconsistent learning signals and unstable convergence. Second, historical representations grow unbounded and lack structure, preventing effective reuse of cached states and severely limiting inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose Neighbor Forcing, a diffusion-step-consistent AR formulation that propagates temporally adjacent frames as latent neighbors under the same noise condition. This design provides a distribution-aligned and stable learning signal while preserving drifting throughout the AR chain. Building upon this, we introduce a structured ConvKV memory mechanism that compresses the keys and values in causal attention into a fixed-length representation, enabling constant-memory inference and truly infinite video generation without relying on short-term motion-frame memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves training convergence, hour-scale generation quality, and inference efficiency compared to existing AR diffusion methods. Numerically, LiveAct enables hour-scale real-time human animation and supports 20 FPS real-time streaming inference on as few as two NVIDIA H100 or H200 GPUs. Quantitative results demonstrate that our method attains state-of-the-art performance in lip-sync accuracy, human animation quality, and emotional expressiveness, with the lowest inference cost.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 12

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

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 intra-scale modeling, which captures local spatial dependencies within each scale, and 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 256times256 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 https://github.com/OliverRensu/MVAR.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 15, 2024

SynTSBench: Rethinking Temporal Pattern Learning in Deep Learning Models for Time Series

Recent advances in deep learning have driven rapid progress in time series forecasting, yet many state-of-the-art models continue to struggle with robust performance in real-world applications, even when they achieve strong results on standard benchmark datasets. This persistent gap can be attributed to the black-box nature of deep learning architectures and the inherent limitations of current evaluation frameworks, which frequently lack the capacity to provide clear, quantitative insights into the specific strengths and weaknesses of different models, thereby complicating the selection of appropriate models for particular forecasting scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a synthetic data-driven evaluation paradigm, SynTSBench, that systematically assesses fundamental modeling capabilities of time series forecasting models through programmable feature configuration. Our framework isolates confounding factors and establishes an interpretable evaluation system with three core analytical dimensions: (1) temporal feature decomposition and capability mapping, which enables systematic evaluation of model capacities to learn specific pattern types; (2) robustness analysis under data irregularities, which quantifies noise tolerance thresholds and anomaly recovery capabilities; and (3) theoretical optimum benchmarking, which establishes performance boundaries for each pattern type-enabling direct comparison between model predictions and mathematical optima. Our experiments show that current deep learning models do not universally approach optimal baselines across all types of temporal features.The code is available at https://github.com/TanQitai/SynTSBench

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 23, 2025

K-Forcing: Joint Next-K-Token Decoding via Push-Forward Language Modeling

Autoregressive (AR) language modeling is the dominant paradigm for text generation, yet its sequential token-by-token decoding makes inference memory-bound and inefficient. Existing acceleration approaches, such as speculative decoding and diffusion language models, can yield speedups under certain conditions but do not directly address high-load batch serving--the scenario most critical for industrial-scale deployment. We introduce K-Forcing, a push-forward language modeling paradigm for joint next-k-token decoding. K-Forcing distills an existing AR model into a conditional push-forward mapping--one that transforms independent uniform noise variables into a joint sample of multiple future tokens in a single forward pass. This design preserves fixed-length outputs, reuses the AR teacher backbone, and remains compatible with standard AR serving infrastructure. We train this mapping via progressive self-forcing distillation, which gradually expands the prediction window while enabling the student to closely match the sequence distribution of the AR teacher. We evaluate K-Forcing on LM1B and OpenWebText using a standard causal Transformer backbone. When aggressively configured to generate k = 4 tokens per forward pass, K-Forcing delivers approximately 2.4-3.5x speedup across different batch sizes, while incurring modest quality degradation relative to its AR teacher. As inference increasingly dominates the lifetime compute cost of modern LLMs, K-Forcing offers a promising route toward accelerating AR generation under real-world high-load deployment.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 8

EAR: Erasing Concepts from Unified Autoregressive Models

Autoregressive (AR) models have achieved unified and strong performance across both visual understanding and image generation tasks. However, removing undesired concepts from AR models while maintaining overall generation quality remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose Erasure Autoregressive Model (EAR), a fine-tuning method for effective and utility-preserving concept erasure in AR models. Specifically, we introduce Windowed Gradient Accumulation (WGA) strategy to align patch-level decoding with erasure objectives, and Thresholded Loss Masking (TLM) strategy to protect content unrelated to the target concept during fine-tuning. Furthermore, we propose a novel benchmark, Erase Concept Generator and Visual Filter (ECGVF), aim at provide a more rigorous and comprehensive foundation for evaluating concept erasure in AR models. Specifically, we first employ structured templates across diverse large language models (LLMs) to pre-generate a large-scale corpus of target-replacement concept prompt pairs. Subsequently, we generate images from these prompts and subject them to rigorous filtering via a visual classifier to ensure concept fidelity and alignment. Extensive experimental results conducted on the ECGVF benchmark with the AR model Janus-Pro demonstrate that EAR achieves marked improvements in both erasure effectiveness and model utility preservation. Code is available at: https://github.com/immc-lab/ear/

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 25, 2025

Your LLM Knows the Future: Uncovering Its Multi-Token Prediction Potential

Autoregressive language models are constrained by their inherently sequential nature, generating one token at a time. This paradigm limits inference speed and parallelism, especially during later stages of generation when the direction and semantics of text are relatively certain. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages the inherent knowledge of vanilla autoregressive language models about future tokens, combining techniques to realize this potential and enable simultaneous prediction of multiple subsequent tokens. Our approach introduces several key innovations: (1) a masked-input formulation where multiple future tokens are jointly predicted from a common prefix; (2) a gated LoRA formulation that preserves the original LLM's functionality, while equipping it for multi-token prediction; (3) a lightweight, learnable sampler module that generates coherent sequences from the predicted future tokens; (4) a set of auxiliary training losses, including a consistency loss, to enhance the coherence and accuracy of jointly generated tokens; and (5) a speculative generation strategy that expands tokens quadratically in the future while maintaining high fidelity. Our method achieves significant speedups through supervised fine-tuning on pretrained models. For example, it generates code and math nearly 5x faster, and improves general chat and knowledge tasks by almost 2.5x. These gains come without any loss in quality.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 15, 2025

FLARE: Diffusion for Hybrid Language Model

Autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs) have achieved broad practical success, but sequential decoding remains a key bottleneck for low-latency deployment. Recent efficient-inference work has progressed along two axes: reducing the cost of each model invocation through efficient architectures, and reducing serial decoding steps through parallel generation. Hybrid attention backbones address the former, while diffusion language models (dLLMs) pursue the latter via iterative parallel denoising. Combining these advantages remains challenging: AR-to-dLLM conversion often fails to preserve seed-checkpoint capability, and hybrid-attention recurrent states and masking constraints make diffusion training and serving nontrivial. We present FLARE, a systematic conversion framework for hybrid-attention LLMs. Our analysis identifies transfer data quality as the primary determinant of capability preservation, outweighing loss formulation and attention-mask design. The resulting framework combines a token-equal AR-and-diffusion objective, hardware-aware kernels, and unified inference, enabling one checkpoint to support both AR-style verified decoding and diffusion-style parallel denoising. Starting from strong AR checkpoints with limited post-training data, FLARE is competitive with leading open-source dLLMs across model scales and delivers consistent throughput gains over open-source dLLM baselines in single-GPU concurrent serving. Our results further suggest that practical dLLMs are limited not only by decoding algorithms, but also by transfer data quality and the training inefficiency of current block-diffusion objectives, motivating joint design of data, objectives, architectures, and inference systems.

  • 12 authors
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May 31

Elucidating the design space of language models for image generation

The success of autoregressive (AR) language models in text generation has inspired the computer vision community to adopt Large Language Models (LLMs) for image generation. However, considering the essential differences between text and image modalities, the design space of language models for image generation remains underexplored. We observe that image tokens exhibit greater randomness compared to text tokens, which presents challenges when training with token prediction. Nevertheless, AR models demonstrate their potential by effectively learning patterns even from a seemingly suboptimal optimization problem. Our analysis also reveals that while all models successfully grasp the importance of local information in image generation, smaller models struggle to capture the global context. In contrast, larger models showcase improved capabilities in this area, helping to explain the performance gains achieved when scaling up model size. We further elucidate the design space of language models for vision generation, including tokenizer choice, model choice, model scalability, vocabulary design, and sampling strategy through extensive comparative experiments. Our work is the first to analyze the optimization behavior of language models in vision generation, and we believe it can inspire more effective designs when applying LMs to other domains. Finally, our elucidated language model for image generation, termed as ELM, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ImageNet 256*256 benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/Pepperlll/LMforImageGeneration.git.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024