arXiv (Cornell University)
SSDD: Single-Step Diffusion Decoder for Efficient Image Tokenization
October 2025 • Théophane Vallaeys, Jakob Verbeek, Matthieu Cord
Tokenizers are a key component of state-of-the-art generative image models, extracting the most important features from the signal while reducing data dimension and redundancy. Most current tokenizers are based on KL-regularized variational autoencoders (KL-VAE), trained with reconstruction, perceptual and adversarial losses. Diffusion decoders have been proposed as a more principled alternative to model the distribution over images conditioned on the latent. However, matching the performance of KL-VAE still requi…