@inproceedings{
wang2024image,
title={Image Understanding Makes for A Good Tokenizer for Image Generation},
author={Luting Wang and Yang Zhao and Zijian Zhang and Jiashi Feng and Si Liu and Bingyi Kang},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=RMmgu49lwn}
}
Modern image generation (IG) models have been shown to capture rich semantics valuable for image understanding (IU) tasks. However, the potential of IU models to improve IG performance remains uncharted. We address this issue using a token-based IG framework, which relies on effective tokenizers to project images into token sequences. Currently, **pixel reconstruction** (e.g., VQGAN) dominates the training objective for image tokenizers. In contrast, our approach adopts the **feature reconstruction** objective, where tokenizers are trained by distilling knowledge from pretrained IU encoders. Comprehensive comparisons indicate that tokenizers with strong IU capabilities achieve superior IG performance across a variety of metrics, datasets, tasks, and proposal networks. Notably, VQ-KD CLIP achieves $4.10$ FID on ImageNet-1k (IN-1k). Visualization suggests that the superiority of VQ-KD can be partly attributed to the rich semantics within the VQ-KD codebook. We further introduce a straightforward pipeline to directly transform IU encoders into tokenizers, demonstrating exceptional effectiveness for IG tasks. These discoveries may energize further exploration into image tokenizer research and inspire the community to reassess the relationship between IU and IG. The code is released at https://github.com/magic-research/vector_quantization.
Image Understanding Makes for A Good Tokenizer for Image Generation
Luting Wang Yang Zhao Zijian Zhang Jiashi Feng Si Liu Bingyi Kang