End-to-End Vision Tokenizer Tuning
Authors: name: Wenxuan Wang; name: Fan Zhang; name: Yufeng Cui; name: Haiwen Diao; name: Zhuoyan Luo; name: Huchuan Lu; name: Jing Liu; name: Xinlong Wang
Published: 2025-05-15 17:59:39

Abstract: Existing vision tokenization isolates the optimization of vision tokenizers
from downstream training, implicitly assuming the visual tokens can generalize
well across various tasks, e.g., image generation and visual question
answering. The vision tokenizer optimized for low-level reconstruction is
agnostic to downstream tasks requiring varied representations and semantics.
This decoupled paradigm introduces a critical misalignment: The loss of the
vision tokenization can be the representation bottleneck for target tasks. For
example, errors in tokenizing text in a given image lead to poor results when
recognizing or generating them. To address this, we propose ETT, an end-to-end
vision tokenizer tuning approach that enables joint optimization between vision
tokenization and target autoregressive tasks. Unlike prior autoregressive
models that use only discrete indices from a frozen vision tokenizer, ETT
leverages the visual embeddings of the tokenizer codebook, and optimizes the
vision tokenizers end-to-end with both reconstruction and caption objectives.
ETT can be seamlessly integrated into existing training pipelines with minimal
architecture modifications. Our ETT is simple to implement and integrate,
without the need to adjust the original codebooks or architectures of the
employed large language models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our
proposed end-to-end vision tokenizer tuning unlocks significant performance
gains, i.e., 2-6% for multimodal understanding and visual generation tasks
compared to frozen tokenizer baselines, while preserving the original
reconstruction capability. We hope this very simple and strong method can
empower multimodal foundation models besides image generation and
understanding.