AToken: A Unified Tokenizer for Vision
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Abstract (arXiv)
We present AToken, the first unified visual tokenizer that achieves both high-fidelity reconstruction and semantic understanding across images, videos, and 3D assets. Unlike existing tokenizers that specialize in either reconstruction or understanding for single modalities, AToken encodes these diverse visual inputs into a shared 4D latent space, unifying both tasks and modalities in a single framework. Specifically, we introduce a pure transformer architecture with 4D rotary position embeddings to process visual inputs of arbitrary resolutions and temporal durations. To ensure stable training, we introduce an adversarial-free training objective that combines perceptual and Gram matrix losses, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. By employing a progressive training curriculum, AToken gradually expands from single images, videos, and 3D, and supports both continuous and discrete latent tokens. AToken achieves 0.21 rFID with 82.2% ImageNet accuracy for images, 3.01 rFVD with 40.2% MSRVTT retrieval for videos, and 28.28 PSNR with 90.9% classification accuracy for 3D.. In downstream applications, AToken enables both visual generation tasks (e.g., image generation with continuous and discrete tokens, text-to-video generation, image-to-3D synthesis) and understanding tasks (e.g., multimodal LLMs), achieving competitive performance across all benchmarks. These results shed light on the next-generation multimodal AI systems built upon unified visual tokenization.
Key facts. Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 139 of its 153 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2025.
Builds on
139 of 153 references.
References · 139
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50 most cited of 139 All 139 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 8; 2026: 22.
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- 2025AlignTok: Aligning Visual Foundation Encoders to Tokenizers for Diffusion Modelscited by 36
- 2025From Perception to Cognition: A Survey of Vision-Language Interactive Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 26
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- 2025AIA: Rethinking Architecture Decoupling Strategy In Unified Multimodal Modelcited by 1
- 2025VLIC: Vision-Language Models As Perceptual Judges for Human-Aligned Image Compressioncited by 1
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- 2026ViTok-v2: Scaling Native Resolution Auto-Encoders to 5 Billion Parameterscited by 1
- 2026ARM: An AutoRegressive Large Multimodal Model with Unified Discrete Representationscited by 1
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- 2026Expressivity In Multimodal Contrastive Learning17 Aug 2026
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- 2026Test-Time Registers as Global Priors for Tokenized Image Generation18 Jul 2026
- 2026FlashDecoder: Real-Time Latent-to-Pixel Streaming Decoder with Transformers16 Jul 2026
- 2026Unified Multimodal Autoregressive Modeling with Shared Context-Visual Tokenizer is Key to Unification16 Jun 2026
- 2026HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers11 Jun 2026
- 2026ARM: An AutoRegressive Large Multimodal Model with Unified Discrete Representations9 Jun 2026
- 2026MergeTok: Unified Continuous and Discrete Visual Tokenization via Token Merging29 May 2026
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- 2026VideoFlexTok: Flexible-Length Coarse-to-Fine Video Tokenization14 Apr 2026
- 2026EVATok: Adaptive Length Video Tokenization for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Generation12 Mar 2026
- 2026Autoregressive Image Generation with Masked Bit Modeling9 Feb 2026
- 2026Adaptive 1D Video Diffusion Autoencoder4 Feb 2026
- 2026VTok: A Unified Video Tokenizer with Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Latents4 Feb 2026
- 2026Compression Tells Intelligence: Visual Coding, Visual Token Technology, and the Unification28 Jan 2026
- 2026iFSQ: Improving FSQ for Image Generation with 1 Line of Code23 Jan 2026
- 2025Both Semantics and Reconstruction Matter: Making Representation Encoders Ready for Text-to-Image Generation and Editing19 Dec 2025
- 2025VLIC: Vision-Language Models As Perceptual Judges for Human-Aligned Image Compression17 Dec 2025
- 2025Spherical Leech Quantization for Visual Tokenization and Generation16 Dec 2025
- 2025AIA: Rethinking Architecture Decoupling Strategy In Unified Multimodal Model27 Nov 2025
- 2025Toward Diffusible High-Dimensional Latent Spaces: A Frequency Perspective27 Nov 2025
- 2025Adapting Self-Supervised Representations as a Latent Space for Efficient Generation16 Oct 2025
- 2025From Perception to Cognition: A Survey of Vision-Language Interactive Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models29 Sep 2025
- 2025AlignTok: Aligning Visual Foundation Encoders to Tokenizers for Diffusion Models29 Sep 2025
- 2025AlignTok: Aligning Visual Foundation Encoders to Tokenizers for Diffusion Modelscited by 36
- 2025Both Semantics and Reconstruction Matter: Making Representation Encoders Ready for Text-to-Image Generation and Editingcited by 22
- 2025Toward Diffusible High-Dimensional Latent Spaces: A Frequency Perspectivecited by 10
- 2026iFSQ: Improving FSQ for Image Generation with 1 Line of Codecited by 4
- 2026Adaptive 1D Video Diffusion Autoencodercited by 3
- 2026VibeToken: Scaling 1D Image Tokenizers and Autoregressive Models for Dynamic Resolution Generationscited by 1
- 2026FlashDecoder: Real-Time Latent-to-Pixel Streaming Decoder with Transformerscited by 1
- 2026DC-SAE: Deep Compression Semantic Autoencoder for Faster Diffusion Convergencecited by 0
- 2026DC-SAE: Deep Compression Semantic Autoencoder for Faster Diffusion Convergence30 Sep 2026
- 2026FlashDecoder: Real-Time Latent-to-Pixel Streaming Decoder with Transformers16 Jul 2026
- 2026VibeToken: Scaling 1D Image Tokenizers and Autoregressive Models for Dynamic Resolution Generations27 Apr 2026
- 2026Adaptive 1D Video Diffusion Autoencoder4 Feb 2026
- 2026iFSQ: Improving FSQ for Image Generation with 1 Line of Code23 Jan 2026
- 2025Both Semantics and Reconstruction Matter: Making Representation Encoders Ready for Text-to-Image Generation and Editing19 Dec 2025
- 2025Toward Diffusible High-Dimensional Latent Spaces: A Frequency Perspective27 Nov 2025
- 2025AlignTok: Aligning Visual Foundation Encoders to Tokenizers for Diffusion Models29 Sep 2025
- 2025Adapting Self-Supervised Representations as a Latent Space for Efficient Generationcited by 13
- 2026Autoregressive Image Generation with Masked Bit Modelingcited by 9
- 2026EVATok: Adaptive Length Video Tokenization for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Generationcited by 7
- 2025Spherical Leech Quantization for Visual Tokenization and Generationcited by 6
- 2026VideoFlexTok: Flexible-Length Coarse-to-Fine Video Tokenizationcited by 6
- 2026Unified Multimodal Autoregressive Modeling with Shared Context-Visual Tokenizer is Key to Unificationcited by 4
- 2026VTok: A Unified Video Tokenizer with Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Latentscited by 3
- 2026MUSE: Resolving Manifold Misalignment in Visual Tokenization via Topological Orthogonalitycited by 3
- 2026V-RAE: Rethinking Video Latent Spaces for Generationcited by 3
- 2026Compression Tells Intelligence: Visual Coding, Visual Token Technology, and the Unificationcited by 2
- 2026HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizerscited by 2
- 2026ViTok-v2: Scaling Native Resolution Auto-Encoders to 5 Billion Parameterscited by 1
12 most cited of 16 All 16 (JSON)
- 2026NesTok: Nested Self-Aligned 1D Tokenizer for Autoregressive Image Generation29 Sep 2026
- 2026A Latent Distribution Perspective on Evaluating and Improving Latent Generative Models21 Sep 2026
- 2026Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models8 Sep 2026
- 2026V-RAE: Rethinking Video Latent Spaces for Generation13 Aug 2026
- 2026Test-Time Registers as Global Priors for Tokenized Image Generation18 Jul 2026
- 2026Unified Multimodal Autoregressive Modeling with Shared Context-Visual Tokenizer is Key to Unification16 Jun 2026
- 2026HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers11 Jun 2026
- 2026MUSE: Resolving Manifold Misalignment in Visual Tokenization via Topological Orthogonality7 May 2026
- 2026ViTok-v2: Scaling Native Resolution Auto-Encoders to 5 Billion Parameters6 May 2026
- 2026VideoFlexTok: Flexible-Length Coarse-to-Fine Video Tokenization14 Apr 2026
- 2026EVATok: Adaptive Length Video Tokenization for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Generation12 Mar 2026
- 2026Autoregressive Image Generation with Masked Bit Modeling9 Feb 2026
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