TTS-VAR: A Test-Time Scaling Framework for Visual Auto-Regressive Generation

Zhekai Chen, Ruihang Chu, Yukang Chen, Shiwei Zhang, Yujie Wei, Yingya Zhang, Xihui Liu

Keywords: Visual Auto-Regressive Modeling, Image Generation, Test-time Scaling

Abstract: Scaling visual generation models is essential for real-world content creation, yet requires substantial training and computational expenses. Alternatively, test-time scaling has garnered growing attention due to resource efficiency and promising performance. In this work, we present the first general test-time scaling framework for visual auto-regressive (VAR) models, TTS-VAR, modeling the generation process as a path searching problem. Inspired by VAR's hierarchical coarse-to-fine multi-scale generation, our framework integrates two key components: (i) At coarse scales, we observe that generated tokens are hard for evaluation, possibly leading to erroneous acceptance of inferior samples or rejection of superior samples. Noticing that the coarse scales contain sufficient structural information, we propose clustering-based diversity search. It preserves structural variety through semantic feature clustering, enabling later selection on samples with higher potential. (ii) In fine scales, resampling-based potential selection prioritizes promising candidates using potential scores, which are defined as reward functions incorporating multi-scale generation history. To dynamically balance computational efficiency with exploration capacity, we further introduce an adaptive descending batch size schedule throughout the causal generation process. Experiments on the powerful VAR model Infinity2B show a notable 8.7% GenEval score improvement (0.69→0.75). Key insights reveal that early-stage structural features effectively influence final quality, and resampling efficacy varies across generation scales.

Primary Area: Applications (e.g., vision, language, speech and audio, Creative AI)

Submission Number: 5153