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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Tokenizer issues. The model doesn't map pixels to tokens 1:1 (that would be very expensive computationally), so fine details in a larger picture might be jarring on close inspection.

The codebook on this model must be absolutely tiny. They are probably trying to avoid bloating up the model vocabulary, but the quality is awful. Latent diffusion models don't use a quantizing vae but instead a continuous latent space, so they have an advantage there. In a sense the diffusion vae isn't compressing the image so much as reducing its dimensionality, but the VQ-VAE is doing some crazy compression.

The saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the ratio is actually much more. I'm sure they'll get it right eventually, but it will be tricky to strike a balance between allocating model capacity to images vs text.

Anyways the problem will probably be solved through scaling up, just like how sora as impressive capabilities but micro-video models are next to worthless. (Of course sora is also useless but it's cool)

They are probably trying to avoid bloating up the model vocabulary

Image tokens should have no impact at all on the vocabulary size. I guess that they are doing the same as other multimodal models (input image is compressed, as you say probably using a VAE, but classically using a pretrained vision transformer), and let the ouput image tokens just be free. No need to quantize anything.