NextStep-1: Toward Autoregressive Image Generation with Continuous Tokens at Scale

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission10459 Authors

Keywords: Generative Models, Autoregressive Models, Diffusion Models, Text-to-image

Abstract: Prevailing autoregressive (AR) models for text-to-image generation either rely on heavy, computationally-intensive diffusion models to process continuous image tokens, or employ vector quantization (VQ) to obtain discrete tokens with quantization loss. In this paper, we push the autoregressive paradigm forward with NextStep-1, a 14B autoregressive model paired with a 157M flow matching head, training on discrete text tokens and continuous image tokens with next-token prediction objectives. NextStep-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance for autoregressive models in text-to-image generation tasks, exhibiting strong capabilities in high-fidelity image synthesis. Furthermore, our method shows strong performance in image editing, highlighting the power and versatility of our unified approach. To facilitate open research, we will release our code and models to the community.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 10459