# Auto-regressive Image Synthesis with Integrated Quantization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10776 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10776/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06759/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Tutorial on Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05908/) (2016)
- [Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11586/) (2017)
- [SEAN: Image Synthesis with Semantic Region-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12861/) (2019)
- [Pose Guided Person Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09368/) (2017)
- [DRIT++: Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01270/) (2019)
- [Parallel WaveNet: Fast High-Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10433/) (2017)
- [MirrorGAN: Learning Text-to-image Generation by Redescription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05854/) (2019)
- [A* Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.0030/) (2014)
- [Controllable Person Image Synthesis with Attribute-Decomposed GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12267/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [ControlVAR: Exploring Controllable Visual Autoregressive Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09750/) (2024)
- [Regularized Vector Quantization for Tokenized Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06424/) (2023)
- [CAR: Controllable Autoregressive Modeling for Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04671/) (2024)
- [Face Transformer: Towards High Fidelity and Accurate Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02530/) (2023)
- [REAR: Rethinking Visual Autoregressive Models via Generator-Tokenizer Consistency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04450/) (2025)
- [Bidirectional Temporal Diffusion Model for Temporally Consistent Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00574/) (2023)
- [PixelBytes: Catching Unified Representation for Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01820/) (2024)
- [HSI-VAR: Rethinking Hyperspectral Restoration through Spatial-Spectral Visual Autoregression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00749/) (2026)
- [Point Cloud Quantization through Multimodal Prompting for 3D Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12079/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep generative models have achieved conspicuous progress in realistic image synthesis with multifarious conditional inputs, while generating diverse yet high-fidelity images remains a grand challenge in conditional image generation. This paper presents a versatile framework for conditional image generation which incorporates the inductive bias of CNNs and powerful sequence modeling of auto-regression that naturally leads to diverse image generation. Instead of independently quantizing the features of multiple domains as in prior research, we design an integrated quantization scheme with a variational regularizer that mingles the feature discretization in multiple domains, and markedly boosts the auto-regressive modeling performance. Notably, the variational regularizer enables to regularize feature distributions in incomparable latent spaces by penalizing the intra-domain variations of distributions. In addition, we design a Gumbel sampling strategy that allows to incorporate distribution uncertainty into the auto-regressive training procedure. The Gumbel sampling substantially mitigates the exposure bias that often incurs misalignment between the training and inference stages and severely impairs the inference performance. Extensive experiments over multiple conditional image generation tasks show that our method achieves superior diverse image generation performance qualitatively and quantitatively as compared with the state-of-the-art.