Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation
This addresses the challenge of visual generation for AI researchers and practitioners by enabling LLMs to compete with diffusion models, though it is incremental as it builds on existing tokenizer methods.
The paper tackles the problem of using large language models (LLMs) for visual generation by introducing MAGVIT-v2, a video tokenizer that maps pixels to discrete tokens, resulting in LLMs outperforming diffusion models on image and video generation benchmarks like ImageNet and Kinetics.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are the dominant models for generative tasks in language, they do not perform as well as diffusion models on image and video generation. To effectively use LLMs for visual generation, one crucial component is the visual tokenizer that maps pixel-space inputs to discrete tokens appropriate for LLM learning. In this paper, we introduce MAGVIT-v2, a video tokenizer designed to generate concise and expressive tokens for both videos and images using a common token vocabulary. Equipped with this new tokenizer, we show that LLMs outperform diffusion models on standard image and video generation benchmarks including ImageNet and Kinetics. In addition, we demonstrate that our tokenizer surpasses the previously top-performing video tokenizer on two more tasks: (1) video compression comparable to the next-generation video codec (VCC) according to human evaluations, and (2) learning effective representations for action recognition tasks.