# Generation then Reconstruction: Accelerating Masked Autoregressive Models via Two-Stage Sampling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17171 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17171/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06759/) (2016)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [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)
- [MAGE: MAsked Generative Encoder to Unify Representation Learning and Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09117/) (2022)
- [Randomized Autoregressive Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00776/) (2024)
- [FlowAR: Scale-wise Autoregressive Image Generation Meets Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15205/) (2024)
- [Harmonizing Visual Representations for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21979/) (2025)
- [Beyond Next-Token: Next-X Prediction for Autoregressive Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20388/) (2025)
- [Deep AutoRegressive Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.8499/) (2013)
- [Fractal Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17437/) (2025)
- [Halton Scheduler For Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17076/) (2025)
- [Neighboring Autoregressive Modeling for Efficient Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10696/) (2025)
- [ZipAR: Parallel Auto-regressive Image Generation through Spatial Locality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04062/) (2024)
- [LightGen: Efficient Image Generation through Knowledge Distillation and Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08619/) (2025)
- [LazyMAR: Accelerating Masked Autoregressive Models via Feature Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12450/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [UltraViCo: Breaking Extrapolation Limits in Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20123/) (2025)
- [Progressive Checkerboards for Autoregressive Multiscale Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03811/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Masked Autoregressive (MAR) models promise better efficiency in visual generation than autoregressive (AR) models for the ability of parallel generation, yet their acceleration potential remains constrained by the modeling complexity of spatially correlated visual tokens in a single step. To address this limitation, we introduce Generation then Reconstruction (GtR), a training-free hierarchical sampling strategy that decomposes generation into two stages: structure generation establishing global semantic scaffolding, followed by detail reconstruction efficiently completing remaining tokens. Assuming that it is more difficult to create an image from scratch than to complement images based on a basic image framework, GtR is designed to achieve acceleration by computing the reconstruction stage quickly while maintaining the generation quality by computing the generation stage slowly. Moreover, observing that tokens on the details of an image often carry more semantic information than tokens in the salient regions, we further propose Frequency-Weighted Token Selection (FTS) to offer more computation budget to tokens on image details, which are localized based on the energy of high frequency information. Extensive experiments on ImageNet class-conditional and text-to-image generation demonstrate 3.72x speedup on MAR-H while maintaining comparable quality (e.g., FID: 1.59, IS: 304.4 vs. original 1.59, 299.1), substantially outperforming existing acceleration methods across various model scales and generation tasks. Our codes will be released in https://github.com/feihongyan1/GtR.