The paper introduces Gated Token Recurrence (GTR), a softmax‑free recurrent vision backbone that replaces global softmax attention with gated linear attention, alternating scan directions, and enhanced SwiGLU blocks. GTR is distilled from a DINOv3 teacher using only final‑layer patch‑token alignment, and achieves strong performance on COCO object detection (58.9 box AP) with very low latency (1.908 ms on an RTX 4090). The backbone also transfers to multiple dense prediction tasks and runs efficiently on edge hardware via a specialized CUDA operator and TensorRT deployment.
By Zhe Feng, Longfei Liu, Wei Liu, Kai Chen, Jiangjiang Kong, Wei Zhou, Yifeng Qian, Dexiong Chen, Xuanlong Yu, Xi Shen
RT-DETRv4 introduces a cost‑effective distillation framework that leverages Vision Foundation Models to improve lightweight real‑time object detectors. The method uses a Deep Semantic Injector to embed high‑level VFM representations into deep detector layers and a Gradient‑guided Adaptive Modulation strategy to adjust semantic transfer intensity based on gradient norms. These techniques yield consistent performance gains across DETR‑based models without adding inference overhead, achieving state‑of‑the‑art COCO AP scores at high FPS.
By Zijun Liao, Yian Zhao, Xin Shan, Yu Yan, Chang Liu, Lei Lu, Xiangyang Ji, Jie Chen
arXiv:2606. 03748v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time vision demands models that are accurate, efficient, and simple to deploy across diverse hardware.
By Glenn Jocher, Jing Qiu, Mengyu Liu, Shuai Lyu, Fatih Cagatay Akyon, Muhammet Esat Kalfaoglu
IronViT proposes a new approach to building efficient generalist vision encoders by first consolidating the knowledge of multiple specialist teachers into a softmax attention bridge and then transferring this consolidated representation to a hybrid softmax‑linear attention architecture. This two‑stage distillation process, supported by a curated data pipeline, allows the model to capture semantic, spatial, language‑aligned, and action‑relevant cues while avoiding the high‑resolution cost of traditional softmax attention. Across tasks such as recognition, retrieval, dense prediction, multimodal understanding, and robotic learning, IronViT matches or exceeds the performance of leading specialist and generalist encoders, with the hybrid encoder offering increasing efficiency at higher resolutions.
By Jiaxi Huang, Yueqi Hu, Xin Zhu, Xiaopeng Zhang, Huiting Qiao, Yanglin Zhang, Zefeng Ji, Rongxue Li, Yifei Xu, Huiying Yu, Wei Liu, Jiayin Zheng, Yinggan Xu, Peipeng Chen, Yin Zhang, Jian Yao
The paper introduces V-CoLA, a training‑free token compression framework tailored for vision-language models that use linear attention. V-CoLA employs a uniqueness‑aware importance criterion to select critical vision tokens and an adaptive token merging strategy to compress them, all optimized to fit the chunk‑wise parallelism of linear attention. Experiments show that V‑CoLA retains 99.5% of the original performance with only half the vision tokens and achieves significant speedups during prefill.
By Hao Jiang, Yiru Mao, Tianpeng Bu, Hao Zhou, Hongtao Duan, Wang Jing, Bowen Xu, Xin Chen, Lulu Hu, Bin Yang, Yongliang Tao, Minying Zhang
arXiv:2607.09086v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We present Subtoken Vision Transformer (SubViT), a selective image tokenization method for fine-grained visual recognition. Standard Vision Transfo...
By Jie Zhu, Ivy Zhang, Minchul Kim, Xiaoming Liu
arXiv:2606. 31834v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world detectors for autonomous driving, surveillance, and robotics must handle domain-shifts under strict latency and memory constraints, yet existing source-free object detection (SFOD) methods rely on heavyweight architectures that prioritize accuracy alone.
By Sairam VCR, Varun Gopal, Poornima Jain, Vineeth N Balasubramanian, Muhammad Haris Khan
arXiv:2605.12491v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) learn rich visual-semantic representations through all-to-all self-attention among patch tokens. However, this design im...
By Alan Z. Song, Yinjie Chen, Mu Nan, Deva Ramanan, Michael J. Tarr, Andrew F. Luo
arXiv:2606. 01503v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unified vision-language models (VLMs) integrate visual understanding and visual generation within a single autoregressive backbone, but their joint training is computationally expensive and largely overlooked from an efficiency perspective.
By Siyi Chen, Weiming Zhuang, Jingtao Li, Lingjuan Lv
LearnPruner rethinks token pruning in vision‑language models by addressing shortcomings of attention mechanisms in vision encoders and large language models. The method uses a two‑stage approach: first a learnable pruning module removes redundant vision tokens after the vision encoder, then only task‑relevant tokens are kept in the LLM’s middle layer. Experiments show that LearnPruner retains about 95% of performance while using only 5.5% of vision tokens, achieving a 3.2× speed‑up.
By Rinyoichi Takezoe, Yaqian Li, Zihao Bo, Anzhou Hou, Mo Guang, Kaiwen Long
MEVL-STP introduces a two‑stage pipeline for spotting arbitrarily shaped scene text. The detection stage fuses features from six frozen vision encoders via a hierarchical Feature Pyramid Network and a Progressive Scale Expansion network to produce precise polygon masks. The recognition stage then crops these masks and feeds them to a fine‑tuned Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct model, achieving state‑of‑the‑art detection and end‑to‑end performance on CTW1500, Total‑Text, and ICDAR 2015 without synthetic pretraining.
By Aman Anand, Partha Pratim Roy, Shivakumara Palaiahnakote
The paper introduces STD, a hierarchical token pruning framework for Large Vision‑Language Models that aligns pruning strategies with the functional roles of different network stages. By using high‑frequency spectral analysis in shallow layers, Gaussian‑smoothed attention in intermediate layers, and a stability‑adaptive trigger in deep layers, STD preserves essential visual information while aggressively reducing token counts. Experiments demonstrate that STD outperforms existing pruning methods, achieving up to 94.4% token reduction and a 3.9× speed‑up on LLaVA‑NeXT‑7B.
By Shuo Zhang, Jintao Tong, Yixiong Zou, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li