{"id":1151493,"date":"2025-10-07T16:55:03","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T23:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=1151493"},"modified":"2025-10-27T15:02:03","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T22:02:03","slug":"distilled-decoding-2-one-step-sampling-of-image-auto-regressive-models-with-conditional-score-distillation","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/distilled-decoding-2-one-step-sampling-of-image-auto-regressive-models-with-conditional-score-distillation\/","title":{"rendered":"Distilled Decoding 2: One-step Sampling of Image Auto-regressive Models with Conditional Score Distillation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Image Auto-regressive (AR) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm of visual generative models. Despite their promising performance, they suffer from slow generation speed due to the large number of sampling steps required. Although Distilled Decoding 1 (DD1) was recently proposed to enable few-step sampling for image AR models, it still incurs significant performance degradation in the one-step setting. In this work, we propose a new method, Distilled Decoding 2 (DD2), to further advances the feasibility of one-step sampling for image AR models without relying on a pre-defined mapping. We view the original AR model as a teacher model which provides the ground truth conditional score in the latent embedding space at each token position. Based on this, we propose a novel \\emph{conditional score distillation loss} to train a one-step generator. Specifically, we train a separate network to predict the conditional score of the generated distribution and apply score distillation at every token position conditioned on previous tokens. Experimental results show that DD2 enables one-step sampling for image AR models with an minimal FID increase from 3.40 to 5.43 on ImageNet-256. Compared to the strongest baseline DD1, DD2 reduces the gap between the one-step sampling and original AR model by 67%, with up to 12.3\u00a0training speed-up simultaneously. DD2 takes a significant step toward the goal of one-step AR generation, opening up new possibilities for fast and high-quality AR modeling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Image Auto-regressive (AR) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm of visual generative models. Despite their promising performance, they suffer from slow generation speed due to the large number of sampling steps required. Although Distilled Decoding 1 (DD1) was recently proposed to enable few-step sampling for image AR models, it still incurs significant performance degradation [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"NeurIPS 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