mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2

arXiv 1906.00446 ↗First posted 2 Jun 2019cs.LG cs.CV stat.MLcited by 1,387

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 287 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

We explore the use of Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) models for large scale image generation. To this end, we scale and enhance the autoregressive priors used in VQ-VAE to generate synthetic samples of much higher coherence and fidelity than possible before. We use simple feed-forward encoder and decoder networks, making our model an attractive candidate for applications where the encoding and/or decoding speed is critical. Additionally, VQ-VAE requires sampling an autoregressive model only in the compressed latent space, which is an order of magnitude faster than sampling in the pixel space, especially for large images. We demonstrate that a multi-scale hierarchical organization of VQ-VAE, augmented with powerful priors over the latent codes, is able to generate samples with quality that rivals that of state of the art Generative Adversarial Networks on multifaceted datasets such as ImageNet, while not suffering from GAN's known shortcomings such as mode collapse and lack of diversity.

Key facts. Cited by 1,387 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2019.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2020: 1; 2021: 156; 2022: 219; 2023: 278; 2024: 276; 2025: 273; 2026: 184.

1,387 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  2. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
  3. 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latentscited by 6,585
  4. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,355
  5. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
  6. 2021Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generationcited by 4,288
  7. 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 3,761
  8. 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 3,614
  9. 2021BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformerscited by 2,375
  10. 2021Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinementcited by 1,511
  11. 2021Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generationcited by 1,163
  12. 2022Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusioncited by 1,106
38 more
  1. 2022MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformercited by 1,099
  2. 2020Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Modelscited by 1,043
  3. 2024Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Predictioncited by 1,023
  4. 2021Transformers in Vision: A Surveycited by 1,013
  5. 2022Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolantscited by 995
  6. 2021Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Imagescited by 927
  7. 2024Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generationcited by 777
  8. 2021Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 774
  9. 2021SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codeccited by 771
  10. 2022Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantizationcited by 722
  11. 2021CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformerscited by 694
  12. 2022High Fidelity Neural Audio Compressioncited by 687
  13. 2021VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformerscited by 658
  14. 2021Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGANcited by 658
  15. 2024Autoregressive Image Generation without Vector Quantizationcited by 651
  16. 2021DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulationcited by 642
  17. 2021Score-based Generative Modeling in Latent Spacecited by 636
  18. 2022AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generationcited by 616
  19. 2023NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLMcited by 615
  20. 2023T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representationscited by 588
  21. 2023MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Languagecited by 527
  22. 2021Tackling the Generative Learning Trilemma with Denoising Diffusion GANscited by 516
  23. 2022Improving Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems using Manifold Constraintscited by 508
  24. 2022Make-A-Scene: Scene-Based Text-to-Image Generation with Human Priorscited by 487
  25. 2022MagicVideo: Efficient Video Generation With Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 465
  26. 2021Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward a Meaningful and Decodable Representationcited by 449
  27. 2022Blended Latent Diffusioncited by 432
  28. 2023High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGANcited by 431
  29. 2024DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planningcited by 386
  30. 2023Shap-E: Generating Conditional 3D Implicit Functionscited by 385
  31. 2022TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Textscited by 359
  32. 2023Denoising Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Image Restorationcited by 340
  33. 2023Synthetic Data from Diffusion Models Improves ImageNet Classificationcited by 327
  34. 2023The Stable Signature: Rooting Watermarks in Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 304
  35. 2024Infinity: Scaling Bitwise AutoRegressive Modeling for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 304
  36. 2024An Image is Worth 32 Tokens for Reconstruction and Generationcited by 302
  37. 2025Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoderscited by 295
  38. 2023Effective Data Augmentation With Diffusion Modelscited by 283

50 most cited of 1,387 All 1,387 (JSON)