Structured State-Space Regularization for Generation-Friendly Image Tokenization

Image tokenizers play a central role in modern generative models, where the structure of the latent space critically determines the downstream generation performance. A key but underexplored property of effective latent representations is spectral organization: the ability to encode information across frequency components. In this work, we introduce structured state-space regularization, a principled approach for inducing spectral structure in latent spaces. We derive a regularization objective by revisiting state-space models (SSMs) as dynamical systems over compressed representations. This perspective reveals that hidden states of SSMs follow basis function dynamics under predefined input transformations, resulting in a novel regularizer form that enforces the latent space to capture spectral components of images. Experiments demonstrate that our regularizer improves the generative performance of image tokenizers while incurring only minimal loss in their reconstruction fidelity.