# DC-AR: Efficient Masked Autoregressive Image Generation with Deep Compression Hybrid Tokenizer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04947 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04947/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [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)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07533/) (2023)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11838/) (2024)
- [Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00704/) (2023)
- [All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12152/) (2022)
- [VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14125/) (2023)
- [Make-A-Scene: Scene-Based Text-to-Image Generation with Human Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13131/) (2022)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [MAGVIT: Masked Generative Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05199/) (2022)
- [SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10629/) (2024)
- [PixArt-Sigma: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04692/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [HPSv3: Towards Wide-Spectrum Human Preference Score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03789/) (2025)
- [Next-Embedding Prediction Makes Strong Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16922/) (2025)
- [Let EEG Models Learn EEG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21280/) (2026)
- [Soft-Di[M]O: Improving One-Step Discrete Image Generation with Soft Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22925/) (2025)
- [TP-Blend: Textual-Prompt Attention Pairing for Precise Object-Style Blending in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08011/) (2026)
- [From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04592/) (2026)
- [VibeToken: Scaling 1D Image Tokenizers and Autoregressive Models for Dynamic Resolution Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24885/) (2026)
- [Masked Auto-Regressive Variational Acceleration: Fast Inference Makes Practical Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15190/) (2025)
- [LINA: Linear Autoregressive Image Generative Models with Continuous Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22630/) (2026)
- [High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Generation from Pre-Trained Vision-Language Models via Distribution-Conditioned Diffusion Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13389/) (2026)
- [Conditional Predictive Sufficient Statistics for Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30647/) (2026)
- [Generative Residual Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34824/) (2026)
- [One-Step Next-Latent Prediction Is Not a World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36227/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce DC-AR, a novel masked autoregressive (AR) text-to-image generation framework that delivers superior image generation quality with exceptional computational efficiency. Due to the tokenizers' limitations, prior masked AR models have lagged behind diffusion models in terms of quality or efficiency. We overcome this limitation by introducing DC-HT - a deep compression hybrid tokenizer for AR models that achieves a 32x spatial compression ratio while maintaining high reconstruction fidelity and cross-resolution generalization ability. Building upon DC-HT, we extend MaskGIT and create a new hybrid masked autoregressive image generation framework that first produces the structural elements through discrete tokens and then applies refinements via residual tokens. DC-AR achieves state-of-the-art results with a gFID of 5.49 on MJHQ-30K and an overall score of 0.69 on GenEval, while offering 1.5-7.9x higher throughput and 2.0-3.5x lower latency compared to prior leading diffusion and autoregressive models.