arXiv Computer Vision

WithinVAE: Compact Visual Autoencoding with Self-Distilled Semantics

WithinVAE is a compact variational visual autoencoder that learns semantic structure internally using a sequential bottleneck and self‑distillation from an exponential‑moving‑average copy of itself. It achieves a four‑fold compression ratio on ImageNet‑1K, improving reconstruction metrics such as PSNR by 1.36 dB over RPiAE while using half the latent capacity. The model also boosts linear probing performance, demonstrating that semantic gains arise from self‑distillation rather than external supervision.

arXiv AI
Oct 9

From Pixels, Without Pre-training: Joint Generative and Self-Supervised Representation Learning in One Model

The paper introduces SCION, a single-model framework that jointly learns generative and self‑supervised representation tasks without relying on labels or pretrained encoders. SCION uses a pixel‑space encoder conditioned on a flow timestep and a shared embedding, training contrastive and flow‑matching objectives simultaneously with gradient‑norm balancing and stop‑gradient techniques. On ImageNet 256×256, SCION achieves state‑of‑the‑art FID scores (8.92 with JiT‑B and 5.89/3.47 with JiT‑L) surpassing prior class‑unconditional and pretrained‑conditioned methods.

By Vicente Balmaseda, Ching-Long Lin, Tianbao Yang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

UVU: Improving Multimodal Understanding via Vision-Language Unified Autoregressive Paradigm

UVU is a vision-language unified autoregressive framework that integrates visual supervision directly into the pre-training stage of multimodal large language models. By using continuous visual encoding and a large-scale iterative hierarchical clustering algorithm to build a pixel-level visual codebook, UVU enables lossless representation of visual inputs and autoregressive generation of pixel-level image tokens alongside textual tokens. This approach synergizes pixel-level visual perception with semantic-level visual understanding, allowing models to internalize visual reconstruction capabilities and improve multimodal understanding performance.

By Zhehan Kan, Xinghua Jiang, Yubo Zhu, Yanlin Liu, Xiaochen Yang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

AffineTok: Semantic Affine Consistency for Diffusion-Friendly Visual Tokenizer

arXiv:2608.23864v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual tokenizers increasingly inject semantic supervision into latent spaces to make downstream diffusion easier. Yet how these semantics should be or...

By Junqiu Yu, Pandeng Li, Yikai Wang, Jiaxing Zhao, Yujie Wei, Kaixun Jiang, Quanhao Li, Hongtao Yu, Zhihang Liu, Zhaohe Liao, Junjie Zhou, Yun Zheng, Yu Liu, Yanwei Fu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

FuseReg: Regularizing Layer Fusion Mitigates the Reconstruction-Generation Gap in Representation Autoencoders

arXiv:2609.31620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Representation autoencoders (RAEs) reuse features from a pretrained visual encoder as reconstruction and diffusion latents, integrating strong visual r...

By Hongyang Du, Yunfei Xie, Junjie Ye, Jiawei Yang, Xiaoyan Cong, Haodong Zhang, Yongchao Huang, Haiyu Wu, Zongxia Li, Shihang Gui, Dawei Liu, Runhao Li, Jingcheng Ni, Chen Wei, Randall Balestriero, Yue Wang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 13

V-RAE: Rethinking Video Latent Spaces for Generation

Latent video generation relies on autoencoders to define a compact space in which generative models operate. Although video autoencoder architectures have evolved substantially, their latent spaces are still optimized primarily for pixel-level reconstruction and provide limited high-level semantic organization.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 27

MAViE: A Multi-scale Adaptive Vision Encoder for Fine-grained Visual Perception and Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

Vision-language models commonly project all tokens produced by a pretrained vision encoder into a large language model. However, final-layer features can discard text, local attributes, and spatial relationships, while high-resolution inputs substantially increase context length and inference latency.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

VIVAS: Vitalizing Visual Perception in VLM Pre-training via Vision-language Unified Autoregressive Supervision

VIVAS is a new Vision‑Language Model pre‑training framework that addresses the lack of fine‑grained visual perception in existing VLMs. It introduces a unified token space and a dense‑structural‑semantic vision tokenizer that expands the textual vocabulary with visual tokens, enabling vision‑language unified autoregressive supervision over both visual details and linguistic content. Trained on 12.4 T tokens, VIVAS achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on 7 tasks and 39 multimodal benchmarks.

By Zhehan Kan, Yubo Zhu, Xinghua Jiang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun
arXiv AI
Aug 28

LeVJEPA: Efficient & Scalable Video Pretraining without the Heuristics

LeVJEPA is a video encoder that eliminates the need for architectural asymmetries, exponential-moving-average target encoders, stop-gradients, and capacity-limited predictors used in prior self‑supervised methods. It trains a single encoder with an invariance loss over global and local views, regularized by SIGReg to prevent collapse, and achieves strong performance with far less pretraining compute. The approach also allows block‑causal attention, making temporal ordering a property of the encoder itself, and matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art baselines on both appearance‑centric and motion‑centric benchmarks.

By Lukas Kuhn, Lucas Maes, Giuseppe Serra, Quentin Le Lidec, Yann LeCun, Randall Balestriero, Florian Buettner