arXiv Computer Vision

Token-Budget Distillation: Transferring Full-Token Semantics to Compressed Video Vision-Language Models

Token-Budget Distillation (TBD) is a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework that adapts video vision‑language models to a fixed token budget. It freezes the pretrained backbone, updates only LoRA adapters, and incorporates FlashVID visual token compression. TBD uses a dual‑path teacher‑student design with full‑token supervision and compressed student optimization, enabling the student to recover full‑token semantics while remaining efficient under aggressive token reduction.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Visual Token Coding for Video Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces Visual Token Coding (VTC), a token compression method for video multimodal large language models that mimics classical video coding by predicting I/P frames and measuring residuals to reduce token redundancy. VTC is extended with dynamic features—Dynamic Resolution Input, Dynamic Token Allocation, and Spatial Coverage Top‑K—forming VTC_Dy, which can be applied to existing MLLMs without additional tuning. Experiments on three MLLMs and multiple video benchmarks show that VTC_Dy retains over 100% of average performance with a 50% token budget and 97.8% with a 25% budget, while the code is publicly available.

By Chenxin Fang, Tao Chen, JunChao You, Jun Peng, Yiyi Zhou, Rongrong Ji
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

CRAFT: Compression via Recursive Adaptive Fusion of Video Tokens for Vision-Language Models

In video understanding, vision-language models (VLMs) must ingest massive numbers of visual tokens, causing the computational and memory cost of the prefill stage to rise sharply. Such visual sequences are highly redundant along the spatio-temporal dimension, yet a high compression ratio is often accompanied by the loss of critical details.

arXiv AI
Oct 2

VETO: Video Efficient Token Optimization for Vision Language Models

VETO (Video Efficient Token Optimization for Vision Language Models) is a plug‑in that reduces the quadratic cost of visual tokens in long‑video inference by applying dual‑axis compression: an intra‑frame compressor merges semantically similar tokens within each frame, and an inter‑frame compressor merges temporally redundant frames. By first compressing spatial dimensions, VETO lowers the cost of subsequent global temporal matching, surpassing single‑axis methods and achieving up to 45% faster inference on models such as LLaVA‑OneVision‑7B while maintaining or improving accuracy. The approach is universally applicable across LLaVA‑OneVision, InternVL‑2.5, and LongVA, preserving or enhancing zero‑shot accuracy even under extreme token budgets.

By Gueter Josmy Faure, Hao Ping Wang, Min-Hung Chen, Winston H. Hsu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Not All Visual Tokens Are Equally Safe to Remove:Consequence-Sensitive Visual Token Compression

arXiv:2608. 09176v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual token compression for vision--language models (VLMs) has largely relied on criteria such as attention, redundancy, and uncertainty to maximize average accuracy under a fixed compute budget, implicitly assuming that all errors carry equal cost.

By Jingbo Wen, Liang He, Mingyu Cao, Haoyu Wang, Minxuan Hu, Kangning Cui, Xilu Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

DataComp-VLM: Improved Open Datasets for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 28551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building performant Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires carefully curating large-scale training datasets, yet the community lacks systematic benchmarks for evaluating such curation strategies.

By Matteo Farina, Vishaal Udandarao, Thao Nguyen, Selim Kuzucu, Maximilian B\"other, Andreas Hochlehnert, Adhiraj Ghosh, Marianna Nezhurina, Karsten Roth, Joschka Struber, Yuhui Zhang, Sebastian Dziadzio, Elaine Sui, Soumya Jahagirdar, Dhruba Ghosh, Hasan Hammoud, Thomas De Min, Simone Caldarella, Jehanzeb Mirza, Sedrick Keh, Mehdi Cherti, Hilde Kuehne, Bernt Schiele, Serena Yeung-Levy, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Federico Tombari, Ana Klimovic, Elisa Ricci, Matthias Bethge, Sewoong Oh, Ameya Prabhu, Alessio Tonioni, Jenia Jitsev, Massimiliano Mancini, Ludwig Schmidt, Nikhil Parthasarathy