Title: ToProVAR: Efficient Visual Autoregressive Modeling via Tri-Dimensional Entropy-Aware Semantic Analysis and Sparsity Optimization
Primary area: infrastructure, software libraries, hardware, systems, etc.
Keywords: Image Generation, Autoregressive Models, Efficient Visual Generation;

Abstract: Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models enhance generation speed but face a critical efficiency bottleneck in later stages. In this paper, we present a novel optimization framework for VAR models that fundamentally differs from prior approaches such as FastVAR and SkipVAR. Instead of relying on heuristic skipping strategies, our method leverages attention entropy to characterize the semantic projections across different dimensions of the model architecture. This enables precise identification of parameter dynamics under varying token granularity levels, semantic scopes, and generation scales. Building on this analysis, we further uncover sparsity patterns along three critical dimensions—token, layer, and scale—and propose a set of fine-grained optimization strategies tailored to these patterns. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that our approach achieves aggressive acceleration of the generation process while significantly preserving semantic fidelity and fine details, outperforming traditional methods in both efficiency and quality. Experiments on Infinity-2B and Infinity-8B models demonstrate that ToProVAR achieves nearly 3.5× average acceleration with minimal quality loss, effectively mitigating the issues found in prior work. Our code will be made publicly available.