| --- |
| license: other |
| license_name: modified-mit |
| license_link: https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/VTP/blob/main/LICENSE |
| language: |
| - en |
| pipeline_tag: image-feature-extraction |
| library_name: transformers |
| --- |
| |
| <div align="center"> |
|
|
| <img src="figures/logo.png" alt="Logo" width="200"/> |
|
|
| <h2> Towards Scalable Pre-training of Visual Tokenizers for Generation </h2> |
|
|
| [Jingfeng Yao](https://github.com/JingfengYao)<sup>1</sup>, [Yuda Song](https://github.com/IDKiro)<sup>2</sup>, Yucong Zhou<sup>2</sup>, [Xinggang Wang](https://xwcv.github.io/)<sup>1,*</sup> |
| |
| <sup>1</sup>Huazhong University of Science and Technology |
| <sup>2</sup>MiniMax |
| <sup>*</sup>Corresponding author: xgwang@hust.edu.cn |
|
|
| ***Work still in Progress.*** |
|
|
| [](https://www.minimax.io/) |
| [](https://www.minimax.io/news/minimax-hailuo-23) |
| [](https://github.com/hustvl) |
| [](https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/VTP-Large-f16d64) |
| [](https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/VTP) |
| [](https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13687) |
|
|
| <img src="figures/abs.png" alt="Abstract Figure" width="900"/> |
|
|
| </div> |
|
|
| ## News |
|
|
| - **[2025.12.16]** We have released our [technical report](https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13687) and [pretrained weights](#get-checkpoints). |
|
|
| ## Takeaways |
|
|
|
|
| By integrating contrastive, self-supervised, and reconstruction learning, we have trained numerous visual tokenizers from scratch. We are seeking to unveil the novel scalability interlinking understanding, generation, and reconstruction. |
|
|
| - **Same FLOPs in DiT Training, VTP scaling helps better generation.** |
|
|
| - **Traditional auto-encoders CANNOT be scaled up for diffusion generative models.** |
|
|
| - **Understanding is the key driver for improving the learnability scaling.** |
|
|
| - **Parameter, data and training scalability can be seen while representation learning involved.** |
|
|
| <div align="center"> |
| <img src="figures/scaling_v2.png" alt="Overview Figure" width="900"/> |
| </div> |
|
|
| ## Get Checkpoints |
|
|
| | Checkpoints | |
| |-------| |
| | [](https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/VTP-Small-f16d64) | |
| | [](https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/VTP-Base-f16d64) | |
| | [](https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/VTP-Large-f16d64) | |
|
|
| Weights will be released very soon. |
|
|
| <details> |
| <summary><b style="font-size: 1.1em;">🚀 Click Here to Quick Start </b></summary> |
|
|
| ``` |
| pip install -r requirements.txt |
| ``` |
|
|
| ```python |
| import torch |
| from PIL import Image |
| from torchvision import transforms |
| |
| from vtp.models.vtp_hf import VTPConfig, VTPModel |
| from vtp.tokenizers import get_tokenizer |
| |
| model = VTPModel.from_pretrained("/path/to/MiniMaxAI/VTP-Large-f16d64") |
| model.eval() |
| |
| # print model parameters |
| def count_params(m): return sum(p.numel() for p in m.parameters()) / 1e6 |
| print(f"Vision Encoder: {count_params(model.trunk):.1f}M") |
| print(f"Pixel Decoder: {count_params(model.pixel_decoder):.1f}M") |
| print(f"Text Encoder: {count_params(model.text_transformer):.1f}M") |
| |
| preprocess = transforms.Compose([ |
| transforms.Resize((256, 256)), |
| transforms.ToTensor(), |
| transforms.Normalize(mean=[0.485, 0.456, 0.406], std=[0.229, 0.224, 0.225]) |
| ]) |
| image = preprocess(Image.open("figures/dog.png")).unsqueeze(0) |
| |
| # --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| # use it as auto-encoder; rFID=0.36 |
| # --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| denormalize = transforms.Normalize( |
| mean=[-0.485/0.229, -0.456/0.224, -0.406/0.225], |
| std=[1/0.229, 1/0.224, 1/0.225] |
| ) |
| with torch.no_grad(), torch.autocast("cuda"): |
| latents = model.get_reconstruction_latents(image) # encode |
| recon = model.get_latents_decoded_images(latents) # decode |
| recon_image = denormalize(recon[0]).clamp(0, 1).permute(1, 2, 0).cpu().numpy() |
| Image.fromarray((recon_image * 255).astype("uint8")).save("output/reconstructed.png") |
| |
| |
| # --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| # use it as clip; zero-shot 78.2 |
| # --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| tokenizer = get_tokenizer('ViT-B-32', context_length=model.config.text_context_length) |
| text = tokenizer(["a diagram", "a dog", "a cat", "a person"]) |
| with torch.no_grad(), torch.autocast("cuda"): |
| image_features = model.get_clip_image_feature(image, normalize=True) |
| text_features = model.get_clip_text_feature(text, normalize=True) |
| text_probs = (100.0 * image_features @ text_features.T).softmax(dim=-1) |
| print("Label probs:", [f"{p:.4f}" for p in text_probs[0].tolist()]) |
| |
| # --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| # use it as ssl feature extractor; linear probing 85.7 |
| # --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| with torch.no_grad(), torch.autocast("cuda"): |
| # get last layer features (cls token + patch tokens) |
| features = model.get_last_layer_feature(image) |
| cls_token = features['cls_token'] # (B, 1024) |
| patch_tokens = features['patch_tokens'] # (B, 256, 1024) for 256x256 image |
| |
| # or get intermediate layer features for linear probing |
| intermediate = model.get_intermediate_layers_feature( |
| image, n=4, return_class_token=True |
| ) # returns 4 x (patch_tokens, cls_token), each cls_token is (B, 1024) |
| for i in range(1, 5): |
| print('Last %d layers:' % i) |
| print('Patch tokens shape:', intermediate[-i][0].shape) |
| print('Cls token shape:', intermediate[-i][1].shape) |
| ``` |
|
|
| </details> |
|
|
| ## Performance |
|
|
| <table> |
| <tr> |
| <th rowspan="2">Model</th> |
| <th colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Understanding</th> |
| <th colspan="1" style="text-align: center;">Reconstruction</th> |
| <th colspan="1" style="text-align: center;">Generation</th> |
| </tr> |
| <tr> |
| <th style="text-align: center;">Zero-shot Acc.</th> |
| <th style="text-align: center;">Linear Probing</th> |
| <th style="text-align: center;">rFID</th> |
| <th style="text-align: center;">LightningDiT-XL 80ep<br>nocfg FID-50K</th> |
| </tr> |
| <tr><td><a href="https://github.com/mlfoundations/open_clip">OpenCLIP</a></td><td style="text-align: center;">74.0</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><a href="https://github.com/openai/CLIP">CLIP</a></td><td style="text-align: center;">75.5</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><a href="https://github.com/google-research/big_vision">SigLIP</a></td><td style="text-align: center;"><strong>80.5</strong></td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><a href="https://github.com/facebookresearch/mae">MAE</a></td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">85.9</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><a href="https://github.com/facebookresearch/dinov2">DINOv2</a></td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;"><strong>86.7</strong></td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><a href="https://github.com/FoundationVision/UniTok">UniTok</a></td><td style="text-align: center;">70.8</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">0.41</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><a href="https://github.com/mit-han-lab/vila-u">VILA-U</a></td><td style="text-align: center;">73.3</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">1.80</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><a href="https://github.com/hustvl/LightningDiT">VA-VAE-f16d32</a></td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">0.28</td><td style="text-align: center;">4.29</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><a href="https://github.com/hustvl/LightningDiT">VA-VAE-f16d64</a></td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;"><strong>0.15</strong></td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><a href="https://github.com/bytetriper/RAE">RAE-f16d768</a></td><td style="text-align: center;">-</td><td style="text-align: center;">84.5</td><td style="text-align: center;">0.57</td><td style="text-align: center;">4.28</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><b>VTP-S-f16d64 (ours)</b></td><td style="text-align: center;">66.7</td><td style="text-align: center;">77.5</td><td style="text-align: center;">0.98</td><td style="text-align: center;">5.46</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><b>VTP-B-f16d64 (ours)</b></td><td style="text-align: center;">73.2</td><td style="text-align: center;">81.0</td><td style="text-align: center;">0.74</td><td style="text-align: center;">3.88</td></tr> |
| <tr><td><b>VTP-L-f16d64 (ours)</b></td><td style="text-align: center;">78.2</td><td style="text-align: center;">85.7</td><td style="text-align: center;">0.36</td><td style="text-align: center;"><strong>2.81</strong></td></tr> |
| </table> |
| |
|
|
| ## Introduction |
|
|
| The quality of the latent space in visual tokenizers (e.g., VAEs) is crucial for modern generative models. However, the standard reconstruction-based training paradigm produces a latent space that is biased towards low-level information, leading to a foundation flaw: better pixel-level accuracy does not lead to higher-quality generation. |
| This implies that pouring extensive compute into visual tokenizer pre-training translates poorly to improved performance in generation. |
|
|
| We identify this as the **"pre-training scaling problem"** and suggest a necessary shift: to be effective for generation, a latent space must concisely represent high-level semantics. |
| We present visual tokenizer pre-training, **VTP**, a unified visual tokenizer pre-training framework, pioneering the joint optimization of image-text contrastive, self-supervised, and reconstruction losses. Our large-scale study reveals two principal findings: (1) understanding is a key driver of generation, and (2) much better scaling properties, where generative performance scales effectively with compute, parameters, and data allocated to the pretraining of the visual tokenizer. After large-scale pre-training, our tokenizer delivers a competitive profile (78.2 zero-shot accuracy, 0.36 rFID) and 3× faster convergence on generation compared to advanced distillation methods. More importantly, it scales effectively: without modifying standard DiT training specs, solely investing more FLOPS in pretraining VTP achieves 65.8\% FID improvement in downstream generation, while conventional autoencoder stagnates very early at 1/10 FLOPS. |
|
|
| <div align="center"> |
| <img src="figures/overview.png" alt="Overview Figure" width="900"/> |
| </div> |
|
|
| ## Evaluation |
|
|
| #### Installation |
|
|
| ```bash |
| conda create -n vtp python=3.10 |
| conda activate vtp |
| git submodule update --init --recursive |
| pip install -r requirements.txt |
| ``` |
|
|
| #### Zero-shot Classification |
|
|
| Modify the corresponding paths in ``scripts/test_zero_shot_hf.sh``. Run: |
| ``` |
| bash scripts/test_zero_shot_hf.sh |
| ``` |
|
|
| #### Linear Probing Classification |
|
|
| Modify the corresponding paths in ``scripts/test_linear_probing_hf.sh``. Run: |
| ``` |
| bash scripts/test_linear_probing_hf.sh |
| ``` |
|
|
| #### ImageNet Reconstruction |
|
|
| Modify the corresponding paths in ``scripts/test_reconstruction_hf.sh``. Run: |
| ``` |
| bash scripts/test_reconstruction_hf.sh |
| ``` |
|
|
| #### ImageNet Generation |
|
|
| We use [LightningDiT](https://github.com/hustvl/LightningDiT) codes to evaluate our generation performance. |
|
|
| Feature extraction: |
| ``` |
| bash generation/scripts/extract_features_vtp.sh generation/configs/train_vtp_l_dit_xl.yaml |
| ``` |
|
|
| LightningDiT training: |
| ``` |
| bash generation/scripts/train_lightningdit_vtp.sh generation/configs/train_vtp_l_dit_xl.yaml |
| ``` |
|
|
|
|
| LightningDiT sampling: |
| ``` |
| bash generation/scripts/inference_lightningdit_vtp.sh generation/configs/train_vtp_l_dit_xl.yaml |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Acknowledgements |
|
|
| Our pre-training codes are built upon [OpenCLIP](https://github.com/mlfoundations/open_clip) and [DINOv2](https://github.com/facebookresearch/dinov2). Our final model variant uses [DINOv3](https://github.com/facebookresearch/dinov3) architecture. |
|
|
| We use [LightningDiT](https://github.com/hustvl/LightningDiT) for generation evaluation. |
|
|
| Thanks for their great codes. |
|
|
| ## Citation |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @article{vtp, |
| title={Towards Scalable Pre-training of Visual Tokenizers for Generation}, |
| author={Yao, Jingfeng and Song, Yuda and Zhou, Yucong and Wang, Xinggang}, |
| journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.13687}, |
| year={2025} |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Contact Us |
|
|
| Contact us at model@minimax.io. |
