Drift-AR: Single-Step Visual Autoregressive Generation via Anti-Symmetric Drifting

TL;DR

Drift-AR introduces a unified entropy-based approach to accelerate autoregressive diffusion models, enabling single-step decoding with significant speedup while maintaining high quality.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel entropy-informed framework that accelerates both AR and diffusion stages in vision models, achieving 3.8-5.5× speedup with one-step decoding.

Findings

Achieves 3.8-5.5× speedup over existing methods.

Enables genuine 1-NFE (single-step) decoding without quality loss.

Demonstrates effectiveness on MAR, TransDiff, and NextStep-1 benchmarks.

Abstract

Autoregressive (AR)-Diffusion hybrid paradigms combine AR's structured semantic modeling with diffusion's high-fidelity synthesis, yet suffer from a dual speed bottleneck: the sequential AR stage and the iterative multi-step denoising of the diffusion vision decode stage. Existing methods address each in isolation without a unified principle design. We observe that the per-position \emph{prediction entropy} of continuous-space AR models naturally encodes spatially varying generation uncertainty, which simultaneously governing draft prediction quality in the AR stage and reflecting the corrective effort required by vision decoding stage, which is not fully explored before. Since entropy is inherently tied to both bottlenecks, it serves as a natural unifying signal for joint acceleration. In this work, we propose \textbf{Drift-AR}, which leverages entropy signal to accelerate both stages: 1) for AR acceleration, we introduce Entropy-Informed Speculative Decoding that align draft-target entropy distributions via a causal-normalized entropy loss, resolving the entropy mismatch that causes excessive draft rejection; 2) for visual decoder acceleration, we reinterpret entropy as the \emph{physical variance} of the initial state for an anti-symmetric drifting field -- high-entropy positions activate stronger drift toward the data manifold while low-entropy positions yield vanishing drift -- enabling single-step (1-NFE) decoding without iterative denoising or distillation. Moreover, both stages share the same entropy signal, which is computed once with no extra cost. Experiments on MAR, TransDiff, and NextStep-1 demonstrate 3.8-5.5$\times$ speedup with genuine 1-NFE decoding, matching or surpassing original quality. Code will be available at https://github.com/aSleepyTree/Drift-AR.