A recipe turned pretrained raster-scan image models into any-order generators, beating MaskGIT on ImageNet inpainting at FID 6.21 versus 10.44
AspireAI community · arXiv (NeurIPS 2026 poster)
Autoregressive image models are locked into a single left-to-right token order, so they cannot inpaint, outpaint or edit at inference time without retraining from scratch. This paper argues the knowledge is already there and only the pathway is missing, and adapts four pretrained models (LlamaGen-L/XL and RAR-L/XL) with future-aware positional embeddings plus an ordering curriculum. On ImageNet inpainting the recipe reached FID 6.21 against MaskGIT's 10.44, stayed competitive with MAR-L, and cost 13-33 percent additional compute beyond pretraining while leaving the standard autoregressive inference stack (KV caching, vLLM) untouched. The honest trade-off is a 1.2-1.9 point increase in class-conditional FID, and the authors note the recipe trades some unconditional fidelity for that flexibility.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.