NextStep-1: Toward Autoregressive Image Generation with Continuous Tokens at Scale

NextStep Team, Chunrui Han, Guopeng Li, Jingwei Wu, Quan Sun, Yan Cai, Yuang Peng, Zheng Ge, Deyu Zhou, Haomiao Tang, Hongyu Zhou, Kenkun Liu, Ailin Huang, Bin Wang, Changxin Miao, Deshan Sun, En Yu, Fukun Yin, Gang Yu, Hao Nie, Haoran Lv, Hanpeng Hu, Jia Wang, Jian Zhou, Jianjian Sun, Kaijun Tan, Kang An, Linkangheng, Liang Zhao, Mei Chen, xing, Rui Wang, Shiyu Liu, Shutao Xia, Tianhao You, Wei Ji, xz, Xin Han, Xuelin Zhang, Yana Wei, Yanming Xu, Yimin Jiang, Yingming Wang, Yu Zhou, Yucheng Han, mengziyang, Binxing Jiao, Daxin Jiang, Xiangyu Zhang, Yibo Zhu

NextStep-1: Toward Autoregressive Image Generation with Continuous Tokens at Scale: 145 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #2 of 13 papers on 2025-08-15. Day-by-day upvote history.

Prevailing autoregressive (AR) models for text-to-image generation either rely on heavy, computationally-intensive diffusion models to process continuous image tokens, or employ vector quantization (VQ) to obtain discrete tokens with quantization loss. In this paper, we push the autoregressive paradigm forward with NextStep-1, a 14B autoregressive model paired with a 157M flow matching head, training on discrete text tokens and continuous image tokens with next-token prediction objectives. NextStep-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance for autoregressive models in text-to-image generation tasks, exhibiting strong capabilities in high-fidelity image synthesis. Furthermore, our method shows strong performance in image editing, highlighting the power and versatility of our unified approach. To facilitate open research, we will release our code and models to the community.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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