Beyond Next-Token: Next-X Prediction for Autoregressive Visual
  Generation
Authors: name: Sucheng Ren; name: Qihang Yu; name: Ju He; name: Xiaohui Shen; name: Alan Yuille; name: Liang-Chieh Chen
Published: 2025-02-27 18:59:08

Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) modeling, known for its next-token prediction paradigm,
underpins state-of-the-art language and visual generative models.
Traditionally, a ``token'' is treated as the smallest prediction unit, often a
discrete symbol in language or a quantized patch in vision. However, the
optimal token definition for 2D image structures remains an open question.
Moreover, AR models suffer from exposure bias, where teacher forcing during
training leads to error accumulation at inference. In this paper, we propose
xAR, a generalized AR framework that extends the notion of a token to an entity
X, which can represent an individual patch token, a cell (a ktimes k
grouping of neighboring patches), a subsample (a non-local grouping of distant
patches), a scale (coarse-to-fine resolution), or even a whole image.
Additionally, we reformulate discrete token classification as
continuous entity regression, leveraging flow-matching methods at each
AR step. This approach conditions training on noisy entities instead of ground
truth tokens, leading to Noisy Context Learning, which effectively alleviates
exposure bias. As a result, xAR offers two key advantages: (1) it enables
flexible prediction units that capture different contextual granularity and
spatial structures, and (2) it mitigates exposure bias by avoiding reliance on
teacher forcing. On ImageNet-256 generation benchmark, our base model, xAR-B
(172M), outperforms DiT-XL/SiT-XL (675M) while achieving 20times faster
inference. Meanwhile, xAR-H sets a new state-of-the-art with an FID of 1.24,
running 2.2times faster than the previous best-performing model without
relying on vision foundation modules (\eg, DINOv2) or advanced guidance
interval sampling.