arXiv Computer Vision

Understanding and Exploiting Diagonal Attention Sparsity in Autoregressive Image Generation

The paper investigates how attention sparsity behaves in autoregressive image generation, finding a distinct diagonal sparsity pattern due to spatial locality of visual tokens. It introduces a diagonal‑aware sparse attention mechanism that skips KV entries along the diagonal within a recent window, achieving up to 3.1× higher throughput and 1.19× lower latency with less than 2% quality loss compared to dense inference.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

PACE: A Unified Condense-and-Extract Paradigm for Fast VLM Inference

PACE introduces a training‑free Condense‑and‑Extract framework that speeds up Vision‑Language Model inference by first adaptively downsampling visual inputs before encoding and then selectively retaining essential tokens during decoding. The Adaptive Pixel Compressor (APC) reduces encoder workload while preserving global context, and the Dynamic Dual‑Attention Extractor (DDAE) keeps task‑critical details by fusing visual and language signals. Applied to Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, PACE maintains 93.8% of performance using only 10% of visual tokens, achieving a 3.1× speedup in time to first token.

By Junjie Liu, Shengyuan Ye, Xu Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 2

Information-Regularized Attention for Visual-Centric Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 00434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a paradigm for multimodal learning, yet remain unstable due to object hallucination, weak visual grounding, and catastrophic forgetting after full-parameter instruction tuning.

By Guohao Sun, Xiaofang Wang, Yash Patel, Mengchen Liu, Zhiqiang Tao, Praveen Krishnan
arXiv AI
Sep 3

NeoMME: A Single-Tower Multimodal-Native Multilingual Foundation Encoder for Efficient Fine-Tuning and Inference

NeoMME is a family of 260M and 800M‑parameter multimodal‑native multilingual encoders that process text and raw image patches in a single bidirectional Transformer. Trained from scratch with a masked discrete‑diffusion objective conditioned on visible image patches, NeoMME supports a 16,384‑token context, enabling encoding of up to two 4K UHD images. In downstream tests, NeoMME‑Retriever models outperform all sub‑800M‑parameter baselines on the ViDoRe v3 benchmark and achieve twice the throughput of ColModernVBERT on an NVIDIA L40S, while hierarchical token pooling and asymmetric quantization compress embeddings 255× with minimal loss in retrieval performance.

By Aur\'elien Lac, Tony Wu