# V2Flow: Unifying Visual Tokenization and Large Language Model Vocabularies for Autoregressive Image Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.07493 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07493/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [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)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04627/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [STAGE: Stable and Generalizable GRPO for Autoregressive Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25027/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Reward Models for High-quality Image Generation: Beyond Text-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19002/) (2025)
- [Towards Better & Faster Autoregressive Image Generation: From the Perspective of Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09012/) (2025)
- [Discrete Tokenization for Multimodal LLMs: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22920/) (2025)
- [Learning User Preferences for Image Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08220/) (2025)
- [MergeTok: Unified Continuous and Discrete Visual Tokenization via Token Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30904/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose V2Flow, a novel tokenizer that produces discrete visual tokens capable of high-fidelity reconstruction, while ensuring structural and latent distribution alignment with the vocabulary space of large language models (LLMs). Leveraging this tight visual-vocabulary coupling, V2Flow enables autoregressive visual generation on top of existing LLMs. Our approach formulates visual tokenization as a flow-matching problem, aiming to learn a mapping from a standard normal prior to the continuous image distribution, conditioned on token sequences embedded within the LLMs vocabulary space. The effectiveness of V2Flow stems from two core designs. First, we propose a Visual Vocabulary resampler, which compresses visual data into compact token sequences, with each represented as a soft categorical distribution over LLM's vocabulary. This allows seamless integration of visual tokens into existing LLMs for autoregressive visual generation. Second, we present a masked autoregressive Rectified-Flow decoder, employing a masked transformer encoder-decoder to refine visual tokens into contextually enriched embeddings. These embeddings then condition a dedicated velocity field for precise reconstruction. Additionally, an autoregressive rectified-flow sampling strategy is incorporated, ensuring flexible sequence lengths while preserving competitive reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments show that V2Flow outperforms mainstream VQ-based tokenizers and facilitates autoregressive visual generation on top of existing. https://github.com/zhangguiwei610/V2Flow