Researchers from Meta AI and UT Austin Test Scaling on Auto-Encoders and Introduce ViTok: ViT-Style Auto-Encoder for testing

Modern methods of image and video production rely heavily on tokenization to combine high-dimensional data into coherent latent representations. While advances in the development of generative models have been substantial, tokens—mainly based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs)—have received relatively little attention. This raises questions about how measuring tokens can improve reconstruction accuracy and productivity. Challenges include architectural limitations and restricted data sets, which affect robustness and widespread use. There is also a need to understand how design choices in automatic encoders affect performance metrics such as reliability, compression, and performance.
Researchers from Meta and UT Austin have addressed these issues by introducing ViTok, a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based auto-encoder. Unlike traditional CNN-based tokens, ViTok uses a Transformer-based architecture developed by the Llama framework. This design supports large-scale tokenization of images and videos, overcoming dataset constraints by training on a wide and varied dataset.
ViTok focuses on three aspects of measurement:
- Bottleneck scaling: Examines the relationship between hidden code size and performance.
- Encoder scaling: Tests the effect of increasing the embedding complexity.
- Decoder scaling: Examining how large decoders influence reconstruction and reproduction.
These efforts aim to improve visual tokenization of both images and videos by addressing the inefficiencies of existing architectures.
Technical Details and Benefits of ViTok
ViTok uses an asymmetric auto-encoder framework with several unique features:
- Patch and Tubelet Embedding: The input is divided into patches (for images) or tubelets (for videos) to capture spatial and spatiotemporal information.
- Latent Bottleneck: The size of the hidden space, defined by the number of floating points (E), determines the balance between compression and reconstruction quality.
- Encoder and decoder design: ViTok uses a lightweight encoder for efficiency and a high-resolution computer recorder for robust reconstruction.
By using Vision Transformers, ViTok improves durability. Its advanced decoder combines optical loss and contrast to produce high-quality output. Together, these components enable ViTok to:
- Get efficient reconstruction with a few FLOPs of computation.
- Manage image and video data efficiently, taking advantage of multiple video sequences.
- Evaluate the trade-off between reliability (eg, PSNR, SSIM) and image quality (eg, FID, IS).
Results and details
ViTok's performance was evaluated using benchmarks such as ImageNet-1K, COCO for images, and UCF-101 for videos. Key findings include:
- Bottleneck Scaling: Increasing the bottle size improves reconstruction but can make productive operations difficult if the latent space is too large.
- Preacher Rating: Larger encoders show less reconfiguration benefits and may hinder production performance due to increased decoding complexity.
- Decoder Rating: Larger decoders improve reconstruction quality, but their benefits for production jobs differ. A balanced design is often required.
The results highlight ViTok's strengths in efficiency and accuracy:
- Excellent image reconstruction metrics at 256p and 512p resolutions.
- Improved video reconstruction scores, showing adaptation to spatiotemporal data.
- Competing generative performance on class conditional functions with reduced computational requirements.

The conclusion
ViTok offers a scalable, Transformer-based alternative to traditional CNN tokens, addressing key challenges in bottleneck design, encoder scaling, and decoder optimization. Its strong performance in all rebuilding and manufacturing operations highlights its potential in a wide range of applications. By effectively managing both image and video data, ViTok emphasizes the importance of thoughtful architectural design in developing virtual tokens.
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