Selftok-Zero: Reinforcement Learning for Visual Generation via Discrete and Autoregressive Visual Tokens

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an indispensable post-training step for unlocking the full potential of Large Language Models (LLMs). Its core motivation is to incentivize the model’s inference trajectory via a reward model, effectively balancing the exploration–exploitation trade-off in scenarios where collecting exhaustive input–output ground-truth pairs is infeasible. This motivation naturally extends to visual generation, where perfect alignment between an image and a textual prompt is inherently ambiguous and often unattainable. However, existing visual generative models are not yet ready for RL due to the following two fundamental drawbacks that undermine the foundations of RL: 1) For diffusion-based models, the actual generation trajectories of sampled images cannot be reliably rewarded, as diffusion inversion is notoriously difficult. 2) For autoregressive (AR) models, we show that the widely used spatial visual tokens do not satisfy the Bellman equation and thus violate the policy improvement theorem of RL. To this end, we propose to use Selftok (Self-consistency Tokenizer), which represents each image as a sequential 1D stream of discrete, autoregressive tokens. Together with language, we train a pure AR vision-language model (VLM) for visual generation. Impressively, without using any text-image training pairs, a simple policy gradient algorithm applied to Selftok tokens significantly boosts visual generation performance, surpassing existing models by a large margin. Implementation details are provided in the Appendix.