dNaViT: Discrete Codes are General-Purpose Visual Representations

Xiaotong Li, Zhengrong Yue, Xu Huang, Jialv Zou, Minhao Jing, Wenhao Yan, Haodong Li, Hai Huang, Bo Zhao, Yan Feng, Peng Pei, Xunliang Cai

dNaViT: Discrete Codes are General-Purpose Visual Representations: 35 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #6 of 39 papers on 2026-11-11. Day-by-day upvote history.

Upvotes over time

It had 32 upvotes by its first day, 35 upvotes by the next day, 35 upvotes by day 3, 35 upvotes by day 7, and has 35 now. It ranked #17 of 133 papers in its week and #54 of 340 in its month.

Discrete autoregressive modeling, notably through next-token prediction, has become a cornerstone of modern language models. Extending this paradigm to vision allows visual and language models to converge on a unified framework, thereby fostering shared methodology and infrastructure. This work investigates a central question: how far can a finite discrete vocabulary go in representing the richness of the visual world? We present dNaViT, a Discrete Native-resolution Vision Transformer that produces discrete visual primitives analogous to language tokens. Built upon a frozen pretrained encoder, dNaViT applies lightweight residual modulation with a dual-branch objective to inject reconstruction-aware cues into semantic features. By leveraging grouped product quantization, it scales discrete capacity without inflating spatial sequence lengths, while a balanced training recipe maintains both semantic and pixel-level information. Consequently, dNaViT functions as a versatile discrete visual tokenizer, enabling unified encoding across downstream tasks alongside high-fidelity image decoding. Extensive evaluations show that dNaViT matches or exceeds task-specific baselines across 12 visual understanding benchmarks, 4 generation benchmarks, and an image editing benchmark. These findings demonstrate that a compact discrete vocabulary can serve as a universal visual currency and unlock the full potential of fully unified, native multimodal methodology.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

Data: hysts-bot-data/daily-papers-stats and the Daily Papers API. Open data: tardellirs/paper-pulse-data. Sister project: Model Pulse, the download history of every model on the Hub.