Neighboring Autoregressive Modeling for Efficient Visual Generation

In this paper, we propose Neighboring Autoregressive Modeling (NAR), a novel paradigm that formulates autoregressive visual generation as a progressive outpainting procedure, following a near-to-far “next-neighbor prediction” mechanism. Starting from an initial token, the remaining tokens are decoded in ascending order of their Manhattan distance from the initial token in the spatial-temporal space, progressively expanding the boundary of the decoded region. To enable parallel prediction of multiple adjacent tokens in the spatial-temporal space, we introduce a set of dimension-oriented decoding heads, each predicting the next token along a mutually orthogonal dimension. During inference, all tokens adjacent to the decoded tokens are processed in parallel, substantially reducing the model forward steps for generation. Experiments on ImageNet 256 x 256 and UCF101 demonstrate that NAR achieves 2.4x and 8.6x higher throughput respectively, while obtaining superior FID/FVD scores for both image and video generation tasks compared to the PAR-4X approach. When evaluating on text-to-image generation benchmark GenEval, NAR with 0.8B parameters outperforms Chameleon-7B while using merely 0.4% of the training data.