Codebook Transfer with Part-of-Speech for Vector-Quantized Image Modeling
Authors: Baoquan Zhang, Huaibin Wang, Chuyao Luo, Xutao Li, Guotao Liang, Yunming Ye, Xiaochen Qi, Yao He

Vector-Quantized Image Modeling (VQIM) is a fundamental research problem in image synthesis which aims to represent an image with a discrete token sequence. Existing studies effectively address this problem by learning a discrete codebook from scratch and in a code-independent manner to quantize continuous representations into discrete tokens. However learning a codebook from scratch and in a code-independent manner is highly challenging which may be a key reason causing codebook collapse i.e. some code vectors can rarely be optimized without regard to the relationship between codes and good codebook priors such that die off finally. In this paper inspired by pretrained language models we find that these language models have actually pretrained a superior codebook via a large number of text corpus but such information is rarely exploited in VQIM. To this end we propose a novel codebook transfer framework with part-of-speech called VQCT which aims to transfer a well-trained codebook from pretrained language models to VQIM for robust codebook learning. Specifically we first introduce a pretrained codebook from language models and part-of-speech knowledge as priors. Then we construct a vision-related codebook with these priors for achieving codebook transfer. Finally a novel codebook transfer network is designed to exploit abundant semantic relationships between codes contained in pretrained codebooks for robust VQIM codebook learning. Experimental results on four datasets show that our VQCT method achieves superior VQIM performance over previous state-of-the-art methods.