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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

BitDance: Scaling Autoregressive Generative Models with Binary Tokens

Yuang Ai, Jiaming Han, Shaobin Zhuang, Weijia Mao, Xuefeng Hu, Ziyan Yang, Zhenheng Yang, Yali Wang, Xiangyu Yue, Hao Chen, Huaibo Huang

Abstract

We present BitDance, a scalable autoregressive (AR) image generator that predicts binary visual tokens instead of codebook indices. With high-entropy binary latents, BitDance lets each token represent up to states, yielding a compact yet highly expressive discrete representation. Sampling from such a huge token space is difficult with standard classification. To resolve this, BitDance uses a binary diffusion head: instead of predicting an index with softmax, it employs continuous-space diffusion to generate the binary tokens. Furthermore, we propose next-patch diffusion, a new decoding method that predicts multiple tokens in parallel with high accuracy, greatly speeding up inference. On ImageNet 256256, BitDance achieves an FID of **1.24**, the best among AR models. With next-patch diffusion, BitDance beats state-of-the-art parallel AR models that use 1.4B parameters, while using **5.4** fewer parameters (260M) and achieving **8.7** speedup. For text-to-image generation and image editing, BitDance trains on large-scale multimodal tokens and generates high-resolution, photorealistic images efficiently, showing strong performance and favorable scaling. When generating 10241024 images, BitDance achieves a speedup of over **30** compared to prior AR models. We release code and models to facilitate further research on AR foundation models.

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