# ResARC: Residual-Aware AutoRegressive Coding for Ultra-Low Bitrate Image Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39451/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06242/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [Rethinking FID: Towards a Better Evaluation Metric for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09603/) (2023)
- [Infinity: Scaling Bitwise AutoRegressive Modeling for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04431/) (2024)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks for Extreme Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02958/) (2018)
- [Exposing flaws of generative model evaluation metrics and their unfair treatment of diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04675/) (2023)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06950/) (2022)
- [Neural Video Compression with Diverse Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14402/) (2023)
- [PaddleOCR 3.0 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05595/) (2025)
- [HART: Efficient Visual Generation with Hybrid Autoregressive Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10812/) (2024)
- [Image and Video Tokenization with Binary Spherical Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07548/) (2024)
- [Towards image compression with perfect realism at ultra-low bitrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10325/) (2023)
- [Improving Statistical Fidelity for Neural Image Compression with Implicit Local Likelihood Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11189/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Progressive autoregressive image codecs provide an appealing paradigm for generative compression by quantizing continuous latents into discrete tokens, transmitting coarse-to-fine prefix tokens and generating the remaining suffix tokens at the decoder. However, their reconstruction quality is fundamentally limited by two residuals introduced along this pipeline: the quantization residual, arising from information loss during discrete tokenization, and the generation residual, resulting from imperfect autoregressive generation of the suffix tokens. To address these limitations, we introduce ResARC, a residual-aware autoregressive codec that explicitly compensates for both residuals at the decoder. Specifically, we generate the quantization residual with a diffusion transformer conditioned on the autoregressive decoding context, while requiring no additional side information. In parallel, we compute the generation residual at the encoder and employ a learned Generation Residual Codec to efficiently compress and transmit it for decoder-side correction. The recovered residuals are then integrated with the reconstructed latent representation and decoded through an adapted VAE decoder. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ResARC achieves competitive perceptual similarity while substantially improving distributional fidelity over leading generative codecs across the ultra-low bitrate regime. Code and models will be released soon.