Making Language the Low-Rate Code of Vision: Successive Refinement from Words to Pixels
An ordered visual code lets a short prefix stand in for an image, and the training loss decides what that prefix contains. Under pixel reconstruction the first bits go to the directions of highest variance, and we prove that a caption can then be independent of the entire first half of a code that is rate-optimal for pixels at every length. In the rate-distortion sense a caption is therefore not the low-rate code of its image, unless the code is built to make it one. We study that construction and what it costs. We cast captioning and text-to-image generation as successive refinement under a distortion measure that changes along the code, from caption log-loss in the early stages to pixel...
| Authors | Ruilin Gong, Hao Gong |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 12 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 October 2026 |
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