+Current vector quantization methods (e.g. [VQ-VAE](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00937#), [RQ-VAE](https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.01941)) either use a single large codebook or multiple smaller codebooks that are used as residuals. Residuals allow for an exponential increase in the number of possible combinations while keeping the number of total codebook items reasonably small by overlapping many codebook elements. If we let $C$ be the codebook size, and $R$ the number of residuals, we can get a theoretical maximum of $C^R$ combinations, assuming that all residuals have the same codebook size. The total number of codebook elements, which is proportional to parameter count, is instead $C\cdot R$. Thus it makes sense to keep $C$ as small as possible to maintain the parameter count reasonably small, while increasing $R$ to exploit the exponential number of combinations.
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