SkipVAR: Accelerating Visual Autoregressive Modeling via Adaptive Frequency-Aware Skipping
This work addresses inference latency for scalable autoregressive image generation, offering a training-free acceleration method that is incremental but practical for deployment.
The paper tackles the inefficiency in Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models by proposing SkipVAR, a sample-adaptive framework that uses frequency-aware strategies to skip unnecessary steps and bypass redundant branches, achieving up to 2.62x speedup on benchmarks while maintaining image quality with over 0.88 average SSIM.
Recent studies on Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models have highlighted that high-frequency components, or later steps, in the generation process contribute disproportionately to inference latency. However, the underlying computational redundancy involved in these steps has yet to be thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the VAR inference process and identify two primary sources of inefficiency: step redundancy and unconditional branch redundancy. To address step redundancy, we propose an automatic step-skipping strategy that selectively omits unnecessary generation steps to improve efficiency. For unconditional branch redundancy, we observe that the information gap between the conditional and unconditional branches is minimal. Leveraging this insight, we introduce unconditional branch replacement, a technique that bypasses the unconditional branch to reduce computational cost. Notably, we observe that the effectiveness of acceleration strategies varies significantly across different samples. Motivated by this, we propose SkipVAR, a sample-adaptive framework that leverages frequency information to dynamically select the most suitable acceleration strategy for each instance. To evaluate the role of high-frequency information, we introduce high-variation benchmark datasets that test model sensitivity to fine details. Extensive experiments show SkipVAR achieves over 0.88 average SSIM with up to 1.81x overall acceleration and 2.62x speedup on the GenEval benchmark, maintaining model quality. These results confirm the effectiveness of frequency-aware, training-free adaptive acceleration for scalable autoregressive image generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/fakerone-li/SkipVAR and has been publicly released.