# Language-Guided Image Tokenization for Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05796 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05796/

## Key facts

- Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)
- [SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08740/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04627/) (2021)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11838/) (2024)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [StyleGAN-XL: Scaling StyleGAN to Large Diverse Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00273/) (2022)
- [Simple diffusion: End-to-end diffusion for high resolution images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11093/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06111/) (2025)
- [REPA-E: Unlocking VAE for End-to-End Tuning with Latent Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10483/) (2025)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Effective Tokenizers for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03444/) (2025)
- [AToken: A Unified Tokenizer for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14476/) (2025)
- [Ming-UniVision: Joint Image Understanding and Generation with a Unified Continuous Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06590/) (2025)
- [CAT: Content-Adaptive Image Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03120/) (2025)
- [SemHiTok: A Unified Image Tokenizer via Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Codebook for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06764/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Medical Code Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04397/) (2025)
- [DC-AR: Efficient Masked Autoregressive Image Generation with Deep Compression Hybrid Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04947/) (2025)
- [Presenting a Paper is an Art: Self-Improvement Aesthetic Agents for Academic Presentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05571/) (2025)
- [Robust Latent Matters: Boosting Image Generation with Sampling Error Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08354/) (2025)
- [WeTok: Powerful Discrete Tokenization for High-Fidelity Visual Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05599/) (2025)
- [Discrete Tokenization for Multimodal LLMs: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22920/) (2025)
- [VFRTok: Variable Frame Rates Video Tokenizer with Duration-Proportional Information Assumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12053/) (2025)
- [Instella-T2I: Pushing the Limits of 1D Discrete Latent Space Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21022/) (2025)
- [REGLUE Your Latents with Global and Local Semantics for Entangled Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16636/) (2025)
- [CaTok: Taming Mean Flows for One-Dimensional Causal Image Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06449/) (2026)
- [Boosting Latent Diffusion Models via Disentangled Representation Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05823/) (2026)
- [TP-Blend: Textual-Prompt Attention Pairing for Precise Object-Style Blending in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08011/) (2026)
- [PyraTok: Language-Aligned Pyramidal Tokenizer for Video Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16210/) (2026)
- [Adaptive 1D Video Diffusion Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04220/) (2026)
- [Aligning Latent Spaces with Flow Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05240/) (2025)
- [TurboVSR: Fantastic Video Upscalers and Where to Find Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23618/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Generative Image Pretraining: How Far Are We From Scaling Up Next-Pixel Prediction?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08704/) (2025)
- [Language-Guided Transformer Tokenizer for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08337/) (2026)
- [MacTok: Robust Continuous Tokenization for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29634/) (2026)
- [Text-Guided Semantic Image Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20770/) (2025)
- [Beyond Patches: Global-aware Autoregressive Model for Multimodal Few-Shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01593/) (2026)
- [Semantic-Aware Prefix Learning for Token-Efficient Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25249/) (2026)
- [Baseline-Relative Counterfactual Refinement for Bit-Aware Visual Token Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16192/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image tokenization, the process of transforming raw image pixels into a compact low-dimensional latent representation, has proven crucial for scalable and efficient image generation. However, mainstream image tokenization methods generally have limited compression rates, making high-resolution image generation computationally expensive. To address this challenge, we propose to leverage language for efficient image tokenization, and we call our method Text-Conditioned Image Tokenization (TexTok). TexTok is a simple yet effective tokenization framework that leverages language to provide a compact, high-level semantic representation. By conditioning the tokenization process on descriptive text captions, TexTok simplifies semantic learning, allowing more learning capacity and token space to be allocated to capture fine-grained visual details, leading to enhanced reconstruction quality and higher compression rates. Compared to the conventional tokenizer without text conditioning, TexTok achieves average reconstruction FID improvements of 29.2% and 48.1% on ImageNet-256 and -512 benchmarks respectively, across varying numbers of tokens. These tokenization improvements consistently translate to 16.3% and 34.3% average improvements in generation FID. By simply replacing the tokenizer in Diffusion Transformer (DiT) with TexTok, our system can achieve a 93.5x inference speedup while still outperforming the original DiT using only 32 tokens on ImageNet-512. TexTok with a vanilla DiT generator achieves state-of-the-art FID scores of 1.46 and 1.62 on ImageNet-256 and -512 respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate TexTok's superiority on the text-to-image generation task, effectively utilizing the off-the-shelf text captions in tokenization. Project page is at: https://kaiwenzha.github.io/textok/.