# Distilled Decoding 1: One-step Sampling of Image Auto-regressive Models with Flow Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17153 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17153/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 49 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17192/) (2022)
- [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)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01318/) (2023)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10774/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Differentially Private Synthetic Data via APIs 3: Using Simulators Instead of Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05505/) (2025)
- [Synthesize Privacy-Preserving High-Resolution Images via Private Textual Intermediaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07555/) (2025)
- [Speculative Jacobi-Denoising Decoding for Accelerating Autoregressive Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08994/) (2025)
- [Soft-Di[M]O: Improving One-Step Discrete Image Generation with Soft Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22925/) (2025)
- [MonarchRT: Efficient Attention for Real-Time Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12271/) (2026)
- [Dimathtt[M]O: Distilling Masked Diffusion Models into One-step Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15457/) (2025)
- [Progressive Supernet Training for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16546/) (2025)
- [From Prediction to Perfection: Introducing Refinement to Autoregressive Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16324/) (2025)
- [Deep Neural Networks Inspired by Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09685/) (2025)
- [Distilled Decoding 2: One-step Sampling of Image Auto-regressive Models with Conditional Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21003/) (2025)
- [Latent Zoning Network: A Unified Principle for Generative Modeling, Representation Learning, and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15591/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Concept Distillation for One-Step Diffusion Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20512/) (2025)
- [SSG: Scaled Spatial Guidance for Multi-Scale Visual Autoregressive Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05534/) (2026)
- [Unfolding Generative Flows with Koopman Operators: Trajectory-Preserving Linearization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22304/) (2025)
- [Nested AutoRegressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23028/) (2025)
- [Dual-Rerank: Fusing Causality and Utility for Industrial Generative Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07420/) (2026)
- [NI Sampling: Accelerating Discrete Diffusion Sampling by Token Order Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18471/) (2026)
- [Omni-Diffusion-Distill: Few-Step Distillation of Unified Multimodal Diffusion Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10990/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autoregressive (AR) models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in text and image generation but suffer from slow generation due to the token-by-token process. We ask an ambitious question: can a pre-trained AR model be adapted to generate outputs in just one or two steps? If successful, this would significantly advance the development and deployment of AR models. We notice that existing works that try to speed up AR generation by generating multiple tokens at once fundamentally cannot capture the output distribution due to the conditional dependencies between tokens, limiting their effectiveness for few-step generation. To address this, we propose Distilled Decoding (DD), which uses flow matching to create a deterministic mapping from Gaussian distribution to the output distribution of the pre-trained AR model. We then train a network to distill this mapping, enabling few-step generation. DD doesn't need the training data of the original AR model, making it more practical. We evaluate DD on state-of-the-art image AR models and present promising results on ImageNet-256. For VAR, which requires 10-step generation, DD enables one-step generation (6.3× speed-up), with an acceptable increase in FID from 4.19 to 9.96. For LlamaGen, DD reduces generation from 256 steps to 1, achieving an 217.8× speed-up with a comparable FID increase from 4.11 to 11.35. In both cases, baseline methods completely fail with FID>100. DD also excels on text-to-image generation, reducing the generation from 256 steps to 2 for LlamaGen with minimal FID increase from 25.70 to 28.95. As the first work to demonstrate the possibility of one-step generation for image AR models, DD challenges the prevailing notion that AR models are inherently slow, and opens up new opportunities for efficient AR generation. The project website is at https://imagination-research.github.io/distilled-decoding.