FreqExit: Enabling Early-Exit Inference for Visual Autoregressive Models via Frequency-Aware Guidance
Ying Li, Chengfei Lyu, Huan Wang
Visual AutoRegressive (VAR) modeling employs a next-scale decoding paradigm that progresses from coarse structures to fine details. While enhancing fidelity and scalability, this approach challenges two fundamental assumptions of conventional dynamic inference: semantic stability (intermediate outputs approximating final results) and monotonic locality (smooth representation evolution across layers), which renders existing dynamic inference methods ineffective for VAR models. %To address this challenge, we propose FreqExit, a unified training framework that enables dynamic inference in VAR without altering its architecture or compromising output quality. FreqExit is based on a key insight: high-frequency details are crucial for perceptual quality and tend to emerge only in later decoding stages. Leveraging this insight, we design targeted mechanisms that guide the model to learn more effectively through frequency-aware supervision. The proposed framework consists of three components: (1) a curriculum-based supervision strategy with progressive layer dropout and early exit loss; (2) a wavelet-domain high-frequency consistency loss that aligns spectral content across different generation steps; and (3) a lightweight self-supervised frequency-gated module that guides adaptive learning of both structural and detailed spectral components.On ImageNet 256×256, FreqExit achieves up to 2× speedup with only minor degradation, and delivers 1.3× acceleration without perceptible quality loss. This enables runtime-adaptive acceleration within a unified model, offering a favorable trade-off between efficiency and fidelity for for practical and flexible deployment.