MoETok:
Sparse Expert Routing
for 1D Visual Tokenizers

Jiahao Guo§ · Bao Tang§ · Haoxiang Cao§ · Jingfeng Yao · Bo Li
Wenyu Liu · Kun Gai · Changqian Yu · Xinggang Wang
§ Work done during internship at KlingAI Research. Project leader · Corresponding author

1D tokens.
More than just 1D.

An image becomes a sequence.
What does each token learn?

01 / AN OPEN QUESTION

What’s inside the sequence?

A transformer compresses an image into learned queries.
Reconstruction and pretrained visual features guide the learning.

→
Encoderpatches + queries
→
1D queries↓
→
VQ
→
Decoderreconstruct
Frozen DINO / SigLIP → visual regularizationTiTok ↗GigaTok ↗StableVQ ↗

Pick a query. Follow its effect.

See its attention and what changes when it is masked.

MaskedQ137
Full reconstruction
Full reconstruction
Encoder attention Q137
Reconstruction
Decoder change
low → high

The same query, across images.

Across ImageNet validation

Q137
Encoder attention
All 256 query attention maps, arranged in query-index order
Decoder change
Aggregated decoder-change patterns for all 256 queries, in the same query-index order

Each tile is one query. The highlighted query follows the selection above.

One sequence. Complementary roles.

Content
Attention follows the subject.

Detail
Stable attention, local reconstruction effects.

02 / FROM OBSERVATION TO DESIGN

Different roles.
Different processing paths.

Token features choose the route.
Reconstruction and visual regularization shape how the experts learn.

ONE TOKENIZER · MULTIPLE ENCODER LAYERS

Swipe to follow the encoder layers →

Follow a learning signal
Reconstruction-orientedRepresentation-orientedShared processing

03 / THE DESIGN CHOICES

What makes it work?

04 / BEYOND THE TOKENIZER

Discrete tokens.
Serious generation.

MoETok also powers a unified autoregressive model,
predicting text and image tokens with the same next-token objective.

0.86GenEval
87.61DPG-Bench
0.49WISE

GenEval2

40.04 GM — 4.56 points from the
closed Gemini reference.

Leading generation among the unified discrete models evaluated in our paper.