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MoETok shows 1D visual tokenizers split into content and detail queries, then routes them through sparse experts

AspireAI community · arXiv (cs.CV)
Query-based 1D visual tokenizers encode images into latent sequences, but how the individual learnable queries gather image information has been poorly understood. This paper reports that under semantic supervision those queries spontaneously develop complementary roles: a small set of Content queries captures high-level semantics while a larger set of Detail queries preserves fine-grained visual detail for reconstruction. MoETok routes tokens through sparsely activated experts, jointly optimised with reconstruction and semantic objectives, so the router learns role-specialised processing paths per token. Across model scales and token budgets, the authors report consistent improvements in reconstruction, semantic representation and autoregressive generation over dense tokenizers at matched supervision and active computation, and on ImageNet a combination of strong reconstruction and semantic representation with state-of-the-art class-conditional generation within the 1D tokenizer family. The improvement is measured at matched active computation, so the comparison isolates routing rather than extra capacity.
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