arXiv Machine Learning

Rethinking Sequence Compression with Test-time Regression

The paper introduces TTR‑Compressor, a new method for sequence compression that treats token aggregation as a test‑time regression problem. Unlike traditional pooling or learned projections, the regression coefficients are learned end‑to‑end and computed in closed form during inference. Experiments show that TTR‑Compressor outperforms existing compressors for block‑wise sparse attention and visual token merging, achieving better performance with fewer tokens.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

V-CoLA: Vision Token Compression with Linear Attention

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 AI
Oct 1

Switching Linear Attention

Switching Linear Attention (SwiLA) is a new sequence layer that improves upon standard softmax attention by maintaining a fixed-size recurrent state while enhancing representational capacity. It derives its recurrence from a test-time regression framework, using online expectation-maximization in a mixture of linear regressions model. In various benchmarks—including associative recall, in-context language learning, and language modeling—SwiLA achieves strong performance, narrowing the gap to softmax attention and even surpassing it in some settings.

By Hyun Dong Lee, Xavier Gonzalez, Nicolas Zucchet, E. Kelly Buchanan, Emily B. Fox, Scott W. Linderman
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Visual Information-Guided Parallel Decoding for Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models

Visual Information-Guided Parallel Decoding for Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models introduces the VIG‑Sampler, a method that prioritizes tokens for decoding based on their attention to image tokens and penalizes redundancy in image‑attention distributions. The approach aims to improve the quality of multimodal generation by selecting more informative tokens during diffusion decoding. Experiments on seven captioning and VQA benchmarks with three open‑source dMLLMs show that VIG‑Sampler outperforms the Info‑Gain Sampler by an average of 19.3 CIDEr points and achieves better COCO Caption results using only half as many decoding steps.

By Insu Lee, Wooje Park, Wonseok Shin, Jinwoo Son, Byonghyo Shim
arXiv AI
Jun 4

MesaNet: Sequence Modeling by Locally Optimal Test-Time Training

arXiv:2506. 05233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sequence modeling is currently dominated by causal transformer architectures that use softmax self-attention.

By Johannes von Oswald, Nino Scherrer, Seijin Kobayashi, Luca Versari, Songlin Yang, Sarthak Mittal, Maximilian Schlegel, Kaitlin Maile, Yanick Schimpf, Oliver Sieberling, Alexander Meulemans, Rif A. Saurous, Guillaume Lajoie, Charlotte Frenkel, Razvan Pascanu, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, Jo\~ao Sacramento
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Compressing Sequences in the Latent Embedding Space: $K$-Token Merging for Large Language Models

The paper introduces K-Token Merging, a latent-space compression method that merges each contiguous block of K token embeddings into a single embedding using a lightweight encoder. The compressed sequence is then processed by a LoRA-adapted large language model, while generation continues in the original vocabulary. Experiments on tasks such as structural reasoning, sentiment classification, and code editing demonstrate that K-Token Merging achieves up to 75% input length reduction with minimal performance loss, placing it on the Pareto frontier of performance versus compression.

By Zihao Xu, John Harvill, Ziwei Fan, Yizhou Sun, Hao Ding, Hao Wang