Autoregressive Token Prediction

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2 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 18

Sep 29, 2026cs.CV

NesTok: Nested Self-Aligned 1D Tokenizer for Autoregressive Image Generation

One-dimensional (1D) variable-length visual tokenizers enable adaptive compression by varying the number of tokens, allowing downstream autoregressive (AR) models to flexibly trade off generation quality against computational cost using a single tokenizer. However, existing approaches based on nested dropout often fail to fully exploit the representational capacity of the tokenizer, resulting in suboptimal performance in both image reconstruction and generation. In this work, we introduce NesTok, a nested self-alignment framework tailored to dynamic visual tokenizers. NesTok introduces cross-length training, which jointly optimizes reconstruction across token lengths while using the full-length sequence to guide shorter counterparts, enabling shorter token sequences to approach the reconstruction quality of full-length sequences. On ImageNet, NesTok improves substantially over standard training and achieves an rFID score of 0.98. On downstream image generation, it achieves the state-of-the-art gFID score of 1.46 on ImageNet 256

\times

256 among existing variable-length autoregressive image generation methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/Jiawei804/NesTok.

Jiawei Zhang, Shuhao Liu, Rong Huang +4

North China Electric Power University · University of Science and Technology of China · Stanford University

Autoregressive Image Generation Visual Tokenizers Autoregressive Token Prediction Tokenizer

Sep 16, 2026quant-ph

Variational Quantum Transformer Architecture for Synthetic Language Generation

We propose a compact NISQ-compatible quantum transformer architecture for synthetic QNLP sequence modelling. The model preserves the autoregressive next-token interface of a classical transformer, but replaces attention and feed-forward sublayers with variational quantum encoder blocks, connector circuits, decoder blocks and a direct two-qubit measurement readout. Token contexts are angle-encoded into small quantum registers, processed by parallel variational heads and encoder integration circuits and conditioned through decoder ancillae to produce a distribution over a four-token vocabulary. We evaluate several architecture variants on deterministic and lexicographic grammar-generation tasks against a compact classical transformer baseline. The quantum models are trainable end-to-end and learn nontrivial grammar structure, including perfect deterministic generation in individual runs and high lexicographic validity in the strongest variant. The classical baseline remains more accurate and stable and the quantum models are sensitive to initialization. The contribution is therefore not a claim of quantum advantage, but a concrete architecture and evaluation of transformer-inspired QNLP sequence modelling under near-term quantum constraints.

Julian Hager, Michael Kölle, Gerhard Stenzel +3

Institute of Informatics, LMU Munich, Oettingenstraße 67, 80538 Munich, Germany

Transformer Architectures Autoregressive Token Prediction Sequence Modeling

Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

On the Design of Qwen3.8-Next Architecture: Evaluation, Efficiency, and Training Stability

We describe the architecture and ablations of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 125B parameters, 6B activated per token, and additional 51B parameters of n-gram embedding tables held off the accelerator. On fourteen pre-training benchmarks the model leads the 397B-A17B predecessor on eight and trails it on the rest by at most 2.6 points, at 1/3 the activated parameters, 1/3 the training tokens, and roughly 1/9 the training FLOPs. Token mixing uses a layer-wise hybrid of Gated DeltaNet (GDN) and global attention, with one full-attention layer in every four; at continued-pretraining time those full-attention layers are replaced by Qwen Sparse Attention (QSA), which scores context at micro-block granularity with a compressed lightweight indexer. The residual stream is widened to four branches and read through an elementwise gate, a design we call the Gated Residual (GR). Capacity is added outside the backbone by a single n-gram embedding layer whose tables are prefetched from host memory. We evaluate every candidate change along three axes: loss together with downstream benchmarks; the cost of the change in training, prefill and decode; and its effect on the optimal hyperparameters and training stability. Loss and downstream accuracy do not always move together: enlarging the n-gram vocabulary lowers loss monotonically while downstream accuracy saturates. The architecture and the Muon optimizer together shift the optimal learning rate and batch size upwards, render batch-size warmup unnecessary, and substantially improve stability under stress tests. Loss, benchmarks, efficiency and stability form one design problem. Solved jointly, they yield a recipe that is simultaneously more efficient, more capable and more stable.

Zihan Qiu, Zekun Wang, Xiao Li +33

Qwen Team

Autoregressive Token Prediction Unigram Tokenizer Dynamic Sparse Attention

Aug 8, 2026eess.AS

ReLMCodec: Designing Predictable Speech Tokens from Pre-Quantization Phoneme Structure

Neural speech codecs face a fundamental tension in the language-model era: tokens that support high-fidelity reconstruction are not necessarily easy for autoregressive models to predict. Our controlled analysis of diverse codec and self-supervised speech representations shows that clearer phoneme structure before discrete code assignment is consistently associated with easier autoregressive token prediction. Yet phoneme structure alone is insufficient for high-fidelity reconstruction, which also requires reconstruction-relevant acoustic detail. Guided by this observation, we introduce ReLMCodec, a low-bitrate single-codebook speech codec built upon a preserve--control--refine principle: it preserves the linguistic organization of frozen self-supervised learning (SSL) features at the quantizer input, controls reconstruction-driven drift through Pre-quantization Anchor-Preserving Adaptation (PAPA), and refines the quantized latent space with a training-only WavLM-Large L24 teacher to reduce phoneme-level token fragmentation. Together, these components allow acoustic detail to support waveform reconstruction while keeping the resulting token sequence predictable for autoregressive models. At 650 and 800 bps, ReLMCodec moves the empirical single-stream predictability--reconstruction frontier in our evaluations, with gains that carry over to downstream text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis in both intelligibility and speaker similarity.

Zixiang Wan, Xusheng Yang, Zheng Wang +1

1Peking University, Shenzhen, China · 2Tencent, Shenzhen, China

Neural Speech Codecs Self-Supervised Speech Models Autoregressive Token Prediction Grapheme-To-Phoneme

Jul 28, 2026cs.CL

AngelSpec: Towards Real-World High Performance Inference with Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference without changing the target distribution, but no single drafting structure performs best across real-world workloads. Autoregressive multi-token prediction (MTP) is a lightweight, stable proposal mechanism, whereas block-parallel diffusion amortizes drafting latency over much longer candidate sequences; the better choice depends strongly on the output distribution. We present AngelSpec, a unified training framework for MTP and block-parallel speculative decoding that addresses this heterogeneity at three levels. At the training level, rather than fitting one universal drafter to a uniform data mixture, we co-specialize structure and data: the MTP drafter is trained on diverse conversational data for high-entropy open-ended chat, and the block-diffusion drafter on code and mathematics data for longer predictable continuations. At the architecture level, we propose DFly, a block-diffusion framework combining a hybrid target-conditioning backbone with a predecessor-conditioned autoregressive head, improving target-feature utilization and intra-block dependency modeling while keeping generation parallel. At the inference level, both acceptance length and verification cost vary with domain, request, online load, and hardware, so DFly treats verification as a shared batch-level resource: it reallocates compute toward high-confidence prefixes across requests and combines expected utility with a profiled cost model to adapt verification depth online. Across the Hy3 series, DFly raises the average accepted length on Hy3-A21B by roughly 30% and attains the highest average throughput at every tested concurrency from 4 to 64, a 1.98-2.40x speedup over autoregressive decoding and 10.5-11.8% higher throughput than DFlash. We release AngelSpec to support training and extending these methods.

Hong Liu, Rui Cen, Junhan Shi +10

Tencent Inc.

Speculative Decoding Block-Diffusion Drafter Fast Inference Multi-Token Prediction Autoregressive Token Prediction Real-World

Jul 2, 2026cs.CV

DeepGaze3.5-VL: Modeling Scanpaths via Autoregressive Token Prediction

Understanding human visual attention on a scene over time has applications in domains such as interface design and inferring cognitive states. Modeling visual scanpaths has historically relied on specialized architectures with hand-crafted priors. While these architectures can model fixation sequences, their rigid structural biases restrict easy extendability and flexible conditioning. For instance, integrating task-specific instructions or adapting to distinct viewer identities requires custom, disjoint architectural additions. We frame scanpath prediction purely as a discrete sequence modeling task. By mapping coordinates into a text vocabulary, we leverage the pretrained representations of Vision-Language Models. This framing absorbs diverse factors of variation: simple prompting allows for global conditioning, such as providing viewer identities to capture personalized biases, or task-specific objectives like visual search. The framework can also integrate per-fixation attributes, such as individual fixation durations, alongside spatial locations. The autoregressive alignment enables the scalable, exact computation of per-fixation log-likelihoods, directly equivalent to the commonly used Information Gain (IG) metric. Our model, DeepGaze3.5-VL, establishes a new state-of-the-art across multiple datasets, achieving 2.18 bits of IG on MIT1003, a 46% improvement over DeepGaze III. This advantage persists even when baselines use identical high-capacity vision encoders. Beyond predictive performance, our generative framework serves as a powerful computational tool for direct behavioral interventions, allowing for controlled in-silico simulations that would be experimentally difficult or impossible to conduct in vivo. We demonstrate this ability by performing controlled interventions on the durations of pre-saccadic fixations, recovering known oculomotor phenomena purely from data.

Susmit Agrawal, Matthias Bethge, Matthias Kümmerer

University of Tübingen · Tübingen AI Center · IMPRS-IS

Autoregressive Token Prediction Generative Models

Jun 26, 2026cs.CL

From Tokens to States: LLMs as a Special Case of World Models and the Continuous Path Beyond

The AI community has framed the relationship between large language models (LLMs) and world models as a dichotomy: LLMs predict tokens; world models simulate reality. Yann LeCun argues in 2022 that reaching general intelligence requires abandoning autoregressive token prediction in favour of latent-space architectures. This framing is unnecessarily binary. Two claims will be defended. First, LLMs are a degenerate special case of world models: the state space is the set of all token sequences, the only action is appending one token, and world models are therefore a strict generalisation of LLMs, not a replacement. Second, there is a natural continuous spectrum from NTP to JEPA, with multi-token prediction, future-summary prediction, and next-latent prediction as intermediate stations already populated by current research. Moving along this spectrum relaxes the LLM constraints one by one. It also progressively surrenders the two practical advantages that make LLMs trainable at scale: internet-scale self-supervised data, and a transformer architecture co-designed for discrete token prediction. Both are examined as open research questions: the data question (the cliff from self-supervised text to instrumented action-labelled environments) and the architecture question (whether the transformer generalises to continuous-state prediction, or whether a new primitive is needed).

Paul Dubois

Autoregressive Token Prediction Latent World Models Compact Latent Sensor Tokens World Models Pathways

Jun 23, 2026cs.CL

DREAM: Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling

Dense retrieval embedding models are a fundamental component of modern retrieval-based AI systems. Most dense retrievers are trained with contrastive objectives, which require labeled positive and negative document pairs that are often costly and difficult to obtain. In this work, we investigate whether the autoregressive next-token prediction objective of a large language model (LLM) can provide supervision for dense retrieval. The intuition is simple: if a document contains information relevant to a query, conditioning on that document should make the target output easier for the LLM to predict. A key challenge is that the next-token prediction loss is computed inside the LLM, while the retriever is a separate embedding model. To address this challenge, we propose DREAM (Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling), which injects retriever-generated query-document similarity scores into selected attention heads of a frozen LLM. During training, these scores determine how much attention each candidate document receives while the LLM predicts the target output. The resulting prediction loss provides gradients for retriever training through the attention mechanism. We evaluate DREAM on retrieval benchmarks BEIR and RTEB using embedding backbones ranging from 0.5B to 3B parameters. DREAM consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model scales. These results demonstrate that DREAM provides a promising approach for training dense retrievers through autoregressive modeling.

Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Retrieval Layer Autoregressive Token Prediction Autoregressive Model Similarity and Metrics Artificial Intelligence Systems

Jun 19, 2026cs.CL

Test-Time Training with Next-Token Prediction

Next-token prediction is the self-supervised signal that trains language models, and every observed prompt token provides the same signal at test time. We study whether this signal can define the inner-loop objective for test-time training (TTT) in pretrained long-context language models. Many TTT architectures require models to be trained with test-time adaptation in mind, limiting their direct applicability to released LLM checkpoints. While recent in-place TTT methods make fast-weight adaptation possible for pretrained LLMs without redesigning the backbone, they leave a central question unresolved: what should each test-time write store? Existing recipes train the fast weight to match a learned local value proxy but they are not directly tied to the self-supervised next-token prediction signal. We introduce Test-Time Training with Next-Token Prediction (TTT-NTP), a drop-in fast-weight adaptation method for pretrained LLMs that instead supervises updates using the model's own next contextual hidden state. This makes each local write follow the same causal computation that supports next-token prediction: the value target is a pointwise linear projection of a single next-position contextual state. On RULER Full-13, averaged over 4k to 32k contexts, TTT-NTP is the only method that consistently improves the released backbone across four models spanning three families and a 0.6-8B size range, by 3.9 points on Llama-3.1-8B, 3.0 on Mistral-7B-v0.3, 4.1 on Qwen3-4B, and 2.9 on Qwen3-0.6B. On the real-world LongBench-v2 long-document QA benchmark, TTT-NTP improves over the base model by 5.6 points on Llama-3.1-8B and 3.7 on Mistral-7B-v0.3, while preserving commonsense and knowledge performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/yancyou/TTT-NTP.

Xuan Ouyang, Zefan Cai, Junjie Hu

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Test-Time Training Next-Token Prediction Autoregressive Token Prediction Test-Time Adaptation Model Checkpoints

May 31, 2026cs.CL

DiffuSent: Towards a Unified Diffusion Framework for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) encompasses seven distinct subtasks, each focusing on different extracted elements. Despite the proven success of generative models in unified aspect sentiment analysis, existing approaches often rely on auto-regressive token-by-token generation without grasping the whole information of the aspect and opinion terms, resulting in boundary insensitivity, particularly in context of multi-word aspect and opinion terms. To address these issues, we present DiffuSent, a non-auto-regressive diffusion framework that systematically formulates all ABSA subtasks as boundary denoising diffusion processes, progressively refining boundaries over noisy states. Furthermore, we introduce a contrastive denoising training strategy which effectively address duplicate predictions with subtle variations introduced by diffusion process. Extensive experiments across 28 settings (7 subtasks x 4 datasets) demonstrate that DiffuSent achieves delivers consistent improvements over the strongest generative and span-based systems. DiffuSent exhibits notable gains on multi-word triplets, achieving an average improvement of +2.48 F1, and maintains robust extraction accuracy in sentences containing multiple sentiment triplets. Moreover, the non-auto-regressive decoding enables substantial efficiency benefits, reaching up to 181 times faster inference than auto-regressive generative baselines

Shu Long, Yanglei Gan, Xuchuan Zhou

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Southwest Petroleum University · Southwest Minzu University

Sentiment Autoregressive Token Prediction Autoregressive Diffusion Diffusion Models Diffusion Dynamics

May 27, 2026hep-ph

Neural Scaling Laws for Jet Generation

Recently observed empirical scaling laws describe the performance of foundation-type models as three independent key quantities -- dataset size, compute, and model parameters -- are modified. Extracting these scaling laws informs the training of large complex models for which the tuning of hyperparameters in traditional ways is not feasible. This work for the first time explores if scaling laws can also be observed for the task of particle jet generation -- both relevant as a pre-training objective for foundation models and as in-situ simulation by itself. We indeed replicate the key logarithmic scaling law behavior for model-size scaling. Beyond studying the next token prediction validation loss of the generative model, we also study the sliced Wasserstein distance of five physical quantities that are not immediately available to the model during training. Our study shows that this quantity is monotonically related to the next token prediction validation loss, meaning that this loss is indeed a good proxy for the physics performance. For the scaling with dataset size and compute, we observe substantially weaker scaling behavior of both the loss and the sliced Wasserstein distance. We analyze this behavior by introducing the concept of a learnable window, and argue that autoregressive next token prediction on jet constituents exhibits comparatively rapid saturation relative to language-model studies. We discuss possible origins of this behavior, including the stochastic nature of QCD radiation and differences between generative and supervised learning tasks in collider physics.

Oz Amram, Darius A. Faroughy, Tjarko Gerdes +5

1Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL 60510, USA · 2NHETC, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA · Institute for Experimental Physics, Universität Hamburg, Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761 Hamburg, Germany +1

Scaling Laws Scaling Autoregressive Token Prediction Downstream Fine-Tuning

May 21, 2026cs.CV

CrossVLA: Cross-Paradigm Post-Training and Inference Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have rapidly converged on a small set of architectural patterns: discrete-token autoregression (e.g. OpenVLA) and continuous-action flow-matching (e.g. pi-0.5). Yet preference alignment via Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) -- the de-facto post-training step in language models -- has been studied almost exclusively on autoregressive VLAs. We present CrossVLA, an empirical study of cross-paradigm VLA post-training. Three contributions: (i) a surrogate flow-matching log-probability estimator that lets DPO operate on continuous-action backbones without probability-flow ODE integration; (ii) a head-to-head comparison of LoRA and DoRA as the parameter-efficient layer for VLA DPO, finding DoRA improves over OpenVLA SFT by a mean +10.4 pp across LIBERO 4-suite (600 trials, 3 seeds) -- per-suite +20.0 Object, +11.0 Long-horizon, +8.0 Goal, +2.7 Spatial -- with zero seed variance on Object (38/50 on each of 3 seeds); (iii) an inference-time anatomy showing the denoise loop dominates 78.6% of sample_actions latency and prefix-K/V caching a la VLA-Cache caps at a 21% acceleration ceiling -- both chunk-level and token-level cache strategies degrade success rate to 0-80% in our benchmarks. We further pretrain a multi-view + temporal projection head on 6000 LIBERO frames, achieving 99.5% k-NN recall@1 for same-task retrieval (36x over random), available as a downstream initialisation. All code, ckpts, training logs, and reproduction scripts are open at https://github.com/lz-googlefycy/vla-lab.

Zhi Liu

Tianjin University

Diffusion-Based Vision-Language-Actions Post-Training Autoregressive Token Prediction Conditional Flow Matching

May 17, 2026cs.CV

Rethinking Point Clouds as Sequences: A Causal Next-Token Predictive Learning Framework

With the rapid progress of multimodal foundation models and predictive pre-training, an important open question is how to equip 3D point clouds with a pre-training paradigm that is better aligned with next-token and next-embedding learning. Existing point-cloud self-supervised methods are largely built on masked reconstruction or explicit geometric generation, and thus remain tied to input recovery rather than predictive dependency modeling. In this paper, we introduce PointNTP, which reformulates point cloud pre-training as a fully causal, decoder-free latent Next-Token Prediction problem. Specifically, each point cloud is first partitioned into local patches and serialized into a structured 3D token sequence according to patch-center geometry. The resulting sequence is then modeled by a causal Transformer under prefix-only conditioning, and trained with a shift-based prediction objective stabilized by stop-gradient targets. This design enables the model to learn structural dependencies directly in latent space, without reconstruction decoders or explicit geometric recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PointNTP is highly competitive across multiple downstream tasks: it achieves 93.8%(+0.5%), 92.6%(+0.3%), and 89.3%(+1.1%) on OBJ_BG, OBJ_ONLY, and PB_T50_RS of ScanObjectNN, respectively; obtains 85.0%(+0.1%) in Cls.mIoU on ShapeNetPart; and reaches 71.1% mAcc on S3DIS Area 5. Overall, decoder-free causal latent prediction provides a simple, scalable, and potentially modality-agnostic paradigm for point-cloud self-supervised learning, offering a new 3D perspective on foundation-style predictive learning for 3D data.

Yumeng Yao, Jingzhi Dong, Haowen Gu +4

Nanjing University of Science and Technology · Hangzhou City University · East China Normal University +1

Point Clouds 3D Foundation Models Autoregressive Token Prediction Causal

May 15, 2026cs.CV

Second-Order Multi-Level Variance Correction for Modality Competition in Multimodal Models

Autoregressive next-token training offers a unified formulation for image generation and text understanding, but it also creates strong modality competition that destabilizes optimization and limits large-batch scaling. We show that first-order optimizers such as AdamW are vulnerable to cross-modality gradient heterogeneity, while second-order preconditioning, particularly SOAP, provides a more stable basis for multimodal alignment. Building on this insight, we propose \emph{ML-FOP-SOAP}, a second-order optimization framework with Multi-Level Variance Correction. Our Fisher-Orthogonal Projection suppresses variance-induced modality conflicts, reducing the trade-off between visual generation and textual understanding. To make this practical under large gradient accumulation, we introduce a hierarchical folding strategy that captures fine-grained variance with low micro-step overhead. Experiments on Janus and Emu3 show consistent gains across both modalities and stable training at batch size 8192. Compared with AdamW, our method improves sample efficiency by up to

1.4\times

and accelerates wall-clock training by up to

1.5\times

, offering a robust optimizer for scaling multimodal foundation models.

Yishun Lu, Wes Armour

University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Multimodal Alignment Multimodal Model Modalities Autoregressive Token Prediction Variance

May 7, 2026cs.LG

PairAlign: A Framework for Sequence Tokenization via Self-Alignment with Applications to Audio Tokenization

Modern learning systems represent perceptual signals with continuous vectors, but comparison, retrieval, memory, alignment, and reasoning are often naturally symbolic. In language, this interface is given by tokens; for speech and audio, it must be learned. Existing audio tokenizers use local quantization, clustering, or reconstruction, leaving sequence consistency, compactness, length control, termination, and edit geometry indirectly optimized. We introduce PairAlign, a framework for compact audio tokenization through sequence-level self-alignment. PairAlign treats tokenization as conditional sequence generation: an encoder maps speech to a condition, and an autoregressive decoder emits tokens from BOS to EOS, learning identity, order, length, and termination. Given two content-preserving views, each token string is trained to be likely under the other's representation, while unrelated examples provide competing sequences. This yields a surrogate for edit-distance preservation while discouraging collapse. Starting from a VQ tokenizer, PairAlign extends a frame-synchronous prior into an autoregressive tokenizer using VQ-derived and EMA-teacher targets, cross-paired teacher forcing, anti-bypass regularization, likelihood contrast, length control, and timing recovery. On 3 s speech, PairAlign learns compact token strings with strong cross-view consistency. In retrieval, it operates at 12.71 tokens/s and reduces archive tokens by 55% versus VQ while preserving edit-distance search. The results expose a compactness--locality trade-off: PairAlign does not aim to dominate dense geometric or SSL tokenizers on every local metric, but provides a lower-rate symbolic interface for comparison, retrieval, and analysis. More broadly, PairAlign is a sequence-symbolic analogue of JEPA-style predictive learning, predicting a learned variable-length symbolic sequence rather than a continuous latent.

Adhiraj Banerjee, Vipul Arora

Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

Audio Tokenizers Autoregressive Token Prediction Value Alignment Latent Variable

May 5, 2026stat.ML

Perturbation is All You Need for Extrapolating Language Models

We introduce a simple yet powerful framework for training large language models. In contrast to the standard autoregressive next-token prediction based on an exact prefix, we propose a perturbation-based procedure that first transforms the prefix into a semantic neighbor and then conditions on this perturbed variant for next-token prediction. This yields a hierarchical model with a pre-post-additive noise structure. Within this framework, we develop a rigorous theory of extrapolability, namely, the capacity of a model class to make reliable predictions for token sequences that lie outside the empirical support of the training corpus. We evaluate the finite-sample performance of the proposed procedure using both synthetic and real-world language data. Results show that the proposed method consistently improves out-of-support prediction while maintaining competitive in-support performance, demonstrating that perturbation offers a practical route to language modeling.

Zetai Cen, Jin Zhu, Xinwei Shen +1

School of Mathematics, University of Bristol · School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham · Department of Statistics, University of Washington +1

Autoregressive Token Prediction Extrapolation Text Corpora

Mar 6, 2026cs.CV

NOVA: Next-step Open-Vocabulary Autoregression for 3D Multi-Object Tracking in Autonomous Driving

Generalizing across unknown targets is critical for open-world perception, yet existing 3D Multi-Object Tracking (3D MOT) pipelines remain limited by closed-set assumptions and ``semantic-blind'' heuristics. To address this, we propose Next-step Open-Vocabulary Autoregression (NOVA), an autoregressive association formulation that shifts the data association stage from fragmented distance-based matching toward trajectory-conditioned spatio-semantic modeling. NOVA reformulates 3D trajectories as structured spatio-temporal semantic sequences, enabling the simultaneous encoding of physical motion continuity and deep linguistic priors. By leveraging the autoregressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we transform the tracking task into a principled process of next-step sequence completion. This mechanism allows the model to explicitly utilize the hierarchical structure of language space to resolve fine-grained semantic ambiguities and maintain identity consistency across complex long-range sequences through high-level commonsense reasoning. Extensive experiments on nuScenes, V2X-Seq-SPD, and KITTI demonstrate the superior performance of NOVA. Notably, on the nuScenes dataset, NOVA achieves an AMOTA of 22.41% for Novel categories, yielding a significant 20.21% absolute improvement over the baseline. These gains are realized through a compact 0.5B autoregressive model. Code will be available at https://github.com/xifen523/NOVA.

Kai Luo, Xu Wang, Rui Fan +1

School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and the National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China · College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China · State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China

Multi-Object Tracking Autonomous Driving Autoregressive Token Prediction

Sep 15, 2025cs.CV

Layout-Conditioned Autoregressive Text-to-Image Generation via Structured Masking

Although autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated remarkable success in image generation, extending these models to layout-conditioned generation remains challenging due to the sparse nature of layout conditions and the risk of feature entanglement. We present \textbf{S}tructured \textbf{M}asking for \textbf{AR}-based \textbf{L}ayout-to-\textbf{I}mage (SMARLI), a novel framework that effectively integrates spatial layout constraints into the AR generation process. To equip AR models with layout control, a structured masking strategy is applied to the attention computation to govern the interaction among the global prompt, layout, and image tokens. This design prevents the misassociation of different regions with their corresponding descriptions while enabling the sufficient injection of layout constraints into the generation process. To alleviate the exposure bias of AR models and further enhance generation quality and layout accuracy, we incorporate a Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) post-training scheme. We adapt it to the next-set-based paradigm and introduce a specifically designed layout reward, which is coordinated with an image quality reward to guide policy optimization in a balanced manner. Experimental results demonstrate that SMARLI seamlessly integrates layout tokens with text and image tokens without compromising generation quality, and the proposed masking strategy and post-training scheme can also be transferred to standard next-token-based AR models. The proposed framework achieves superior layout control while maintaining the structural simplicity and generation efficiency of AR models.

Zirui Zheng, Takashi Isobe, Tong Shen +12

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. · Dalian University of Technology · S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University

Autoregressive Image Generation Layouts High-Fidelity Conditional Generation Autoregressive Token Prediction Image Quality Assessment