ResearchResearch paperImage, Video & 3D Generation · Efficiency & Inference2 sources · Oct 8, 2026

BudgetPix: Compute-Adaptive Tokenization for Pixel-Space Image Diffusion

We propose BudgetPix, an adaptive tokenization framework that dynamically allocates compute based on visual complexity and spatial layout, enabling flexible computational budgeting at inference time.

Key points

  • Most image generation models rely on uniform tokenization, allocating the exact same computational budget to equally-sized image patches.
  • BudgetPix comprises three key components: (1) an adaptive encoder that maps a fixed-size image to a variable-length token sequence using an entropy-guided quadtree alongside a multi-scale patch embedder; (2) a scale-aware decoder reconstructs fixed-resolution images from multi-scale token sets; and (3) a flexible training and sampling schedule that enables pixel-space denoisers to operate across variable token counts.
  • Evaluated on text-to-image generation, BudgetPix matches the fidelity of MiniT2I-L at $512^2$ and PixelDiT at $1024^2$ using just 25% of the original compute budget.
  • In class-conditional generation using a MeanFlow backbone, BudgetPix requires merely 60% of the full compute budget to produce images with near-zero quality degradation, observing a marginal 0.8-point increase in FID.

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