Commonly used image tokenizers produce a 2D grid of spatially arranged tokens. In contrast, so-called 1D image tokenizers represent images as highly compressed one-dimensional sequences of as few as 32 discrete tokens. We find that the high degree of compression achieved by a 1D tokenizer with vector quantization enables image editing and generative capabilities through heuristic manipulation of tokens, demonstrating that even very crude manipulations -- such as copying and replacing tokens between latent representations of images -- enable fine-grained image editing by transferring appearance and semantic attributes. Motivated by the expressivity of the 1D tokenizer's latent space, we construct an image generation pipeline leveraging gradient-based test-time optimization of tokens with plug-and-play loss functions such as reconstruction or CLIP similarity. Our approach is demonstrated for inpainting and text-guided image editing use cases, and can generate diverse and realistic samples without requiring training of any generative model.
View on arXiv@article{beyer2025_2506.08257,
title={ Highly Compressed Tokenizer Can Generate Without Training },
author={ L. Lao Beyer and T. Li and X. Chen and S. Karaman and K. He },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08257},
year={ 2025 }
}