The Prism Hypothesis: Harmonizing Semantic and Pixel Representations via Unified Autoencoding

weichenfan, Haiwen Diao, Quan Wang, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu

The Prism Hypothesis: Harmonizing Semantic and Pixel Representations via Unified Autoencoding: 68 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #2 of 24 papers on 2025-12-23. Day-by-day upvote history.

Deep representations across modalities are inherently intertwined. In this paper, we systematically analyze the spectral characteristics of various semantic and pixel encoders. Interestingly, our study uncovers a highly inspiring and rarely explored correspondence between an encoder's feature spectrum and its functional role: semantic encoders primarily capture low-frequency components that encode abstract meaning, whereas pixel encoders additionally retain high-frequency information that conveys fine-grained detail. This heuristic finding offers a unifying perspective that ties encoder behavior to its underlying spectral structure. We define it as the Prism Hypothesis, where each data modality can be viewed as a projection of the natural world onto a shared feature spectrum, just like the prism. Building on this insight, we propose Unified Autoencoding (UAE), a model that harmonizes semantic structure and pixel details via an innovative frequency-band modulator, enabling their seamless coexistence. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and MS-COCO benchmarks validate that our UAE effectively unifies semantic abstraction and pixel-level fidelity into a single latent space with state-of-the-art performance.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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