Token-Based Multi-condition Autoregressive Diffusion for Lung CT Image Generation
摘要
Medical image generation faces challenges due to data scarcity, high annotation costs, and the need for precise structural fidelity. While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images, they suffer from slow sampling speeds. Conversely, autoregressive models, although efficient in sequence modeling, struggle with continuous visual signals. In this work, we propose a diffusion-to-autoregressive framework for lung CT image synthesis, where the autoregressive model learns the temporal denoising dynamics of a diffusion process. Specifically, we introduce a sequential diffusion tokenizer that discretizes intermediate diffusion latents into structured token sequences, enabling the AR transformer to perform next-step predictions on diffusion trajectories rather than raw images. This formulation preserves the coarse-to-fine generation behavior of diffusion models while substantially accelerating sampling. Additionally, we incorporate a multi-condition guidance mechanism that utilizes segmentation masks and anatomical structures to enhance generation controllability. Experiments on a low-dose lung CT dataset show that our method achieves outstanding performance in FID, IS, and SSIM metrics. Furthermore, a Visual Turing Test conducted with radiologists confirms the perceptual realism of the generated images. Our approach has potential for extension to multi-task and multi-modality medical imaging applications.