mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

AToken: A Unified Tokenizer for Vision

arXiv 2509.14476 ↗First posted 17 Sep 2025cs.CV cs.AI cs.MMcited by 30

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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

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
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  8. 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,974
  9. 2021Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learnerscited by 7,403
  10. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
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38 more
  1. 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,326
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  3. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
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50 most cited of 139 All 139 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 8; 2026: 22.

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  1. 2025AlignTok: Aligning Visual Foundation Encoders to Tokenizers for Diffusion Modelscited by 36
  2. 2025From Perception to Cognition: A Survey of Vision-Language Interactive Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 26
  3. 2025Both Semantics and Reconstruction Matter: Making Representation Encoders Ready for Text-to-Image Generation and Editingcited by 22
  4. 2025Adapting Self-Supervised Representations as a Latent Space for Efficient Generationcited by 13
  5. 2025Toward Diffusible High-Dimensional Latent Spaces: A Frequency Perspectivecited by 10
  6. 2026Autoregressive Image Generation with Masked Bit Modelingcited by 9
  7. 2026EVATok: Adaptive Length Video Tokenization for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Generationcited by 7
  8. 2025Spherical Leech Quantization for Visual Tokenization and Generationcited by 6
  9. 2026VideoFlexTok: Flexible-Length Coarse-to-Fine Video Tokenizationcited by 6
  10. 2026iFSQ: Improving FSQ for Image Generation with 1 Line of Codecited by 4
  11. 2026Unified Multimodal Autoregressive Modeling with Shared Context-Visual Tokenizer is Key to Unificationcited by 4
  12. 2026VTok: A Unified Video Tokenizer with Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Latentscited by 3
18 more
  1. 2026Adaptive 1D Video Diffusion Autoencodercited by 3
  2. 2026MUSE: Resolving Manifold Misalignment in Visual Tokenization via Topological Orthogonalitycited by 3
  3. 2026V-RAE: Rethinking Video Latent Spaces for Generationcited by 3
  4. 2026Compression Tells Intelligence: Visual Coding, Visual Token Technology, and the Unificationcited by 2
  5. 2026HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizerscited by 2
  6. 2025AIA: Rethinking Architecture Decoupling Strategy In Unified Multimodal Modelcited by 1
  7. 2025VLIC: Vision-Language Models As Perceptual Judges for Human-Aligned Image Compressioncited by 1
  8. 2026VibeToken: Scaling 1D Image Tokenizers and Autoregressive Models for Dynamic Resolution Generationscited by 1
  9. 2026ViTok-v2: Scaling Native Resolution Auto-Encoders to 5 Billion Parameterscited by 1
  10. 2026ARM: An AutoRegressive Large Multimodal Model with Unified Discrete Representationscited by 1
  11. 2026FlashDecoder: Real-Time Latent-to-Pixel Streaming Decoder with Transformerscited by 1
  12. 2026MergeTok: Unified Continuous and Discrete Visual Tokenization via Token Mergingcited by 0
  13. 2026Test-Time Registers as Global Priors for Tokenized Image Generationcited by 0
  14. 2026Expressivity In Multimodal Contrastive Learningcited by 0
  15. 2026Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Modelscited by 0
  16. 2026A Latent Distribution Perspective on Evaluating and Improving Latent Generative Modelscited by 0
  17. 2026NesTok: Nested Self-Aligned 1D Tokenizer for Autoregressive Image Generationcited by 0
  18. 2026DC-SAE: Deep Compression Semantic Autoencoder for Faster Diffusion Convergencecited by 0

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