ELT: Elastic Looped Transformers for Visual Generation

Sahil Goyal, Swayam Agrawal, Gautham Govind Anil, Prateek Jain, Sujoy Paul, Aditya Kusupati

ELT: Elastic Looped Transformers for Visual Generation: 24 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #8 of 29 papers on 2026-04-13. Day-by-day upvote history.

We introduce Elastic Looped Transformers (ELT), a highly parameter-efficient class of visual generative models based on a recurrent transformer architecture. While conventional generative models rely on deep stacks of unique transformer layers, our approach employs iterative, weight-shared transformer blocks to drastically reduce parameter counts while maintaining high synthesis quality. To effectively train these models for image and video generation, we propose the idea of Intra-Loop Self Distillation (ILSD), where student configurations (intermediate loops) are distilled from the teacher configuration (maximum training loops) to ensure consistency across the model's depth in a single training step. Our framework yields a family of elastic models from a single training run, enabling Any-Time inference capability with dynamic trade-offs between computational cost and generation quality, with the same parameter count. ELT significantly shifts the efficiency frontier for visual synthesis. With 4times reduction in parameter count under iso-inference-compute settings, ELT achieves a competitive FID of 2.0 on class-conditional ImageNet 256 times 256 and FVD of 72.8 on class-conditional UCF-101.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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