Regularized Vector Quantization for Tokenized Image Synthesis

Quantizing images into discrete representations has been a fundamental problem in unified generative modeling. Predominant approaches learn the discrete representation either in a deterministic manner by selecting the best-matching token or in a stochastic manner by sampling from a predicted distribution. However, deterministic quantization suffers from severe codebook collapse and misaligned inference stage while stochastic quantization suffers from low codebook utilization and perturbed reconstruction objective. This paper presents a regularized vector quantization framework that allows to mitigate above issues effectively by applying regularization from two perspectives. The first is a prior distribution regularization which measures the discrepancy between a prior token distribution and predicted token distribution to avoid codebook collapse and low codebook utilization. The second is a stochastic mask regularization that introduces stochasticity during quantization to strike a good balance between inference stage misalignment and unperturbed reconstruction objective. In addition, we design a probabilistic contrastive loss which serves as a calibrated metric to further mitigate the perturbed reconstruction objective. Extensive experiments show that the proposed quantization framework outperforms prevailing vector quantizers consistently across different generative models including auto-regressive models and diffusion models.