arXiv Computer Vision

SAGE: Saliency-Annealed Gated Encoder for Universal Vision Recognition

SAGE (Saliency‑Annealed Gated Encoder) is a Vision Transformer‑based backbone that explicitly leverages saliency, global context, and high‑frequency details through a saliency‑guided architecture, an annealing training paradigm, and a two‑stage loss transition. It achieves state‑of‑the‑art or competitive results on a wide range of dense prediction tasks, including COCO object detection and segmentation, ADE20K segmentation, TinyImageNet classification, and DIOR‑R oriented detection, all using the same backbone with task‑specific decoders. The framework is notable for being the first to deliver multi‑task SOTA performance on Huawei Ascend NPUs.

arXiv AI
6d ago

ACSAN: All-Convolutional Self-Attention Network Integrating Convolutional Operations with Vision Transformer

The paper introduces ACSAN, an All‑Convolutional Self‑Attention Network that replaces the fully‑connected matrix multiplications of Vision Transformers with convolution operations. Its core module, Dynamic Convolutional Self‑Attention (DCSA), uses multi‑scale dilated convolutions to produce Query, Key, and Value tensors, and combines spatial and channel self‑attention into a single output. Experiments on CIFAR‑10, CIFAR‑100, and ImageNet‑1k demonstrate that ACSAN attains competitive or superior classification accuracy to ViT while using comparable or fewer parameters, and ablation studies confirm the positive contribution of each component.

By Zimian Wei, Tianqi Zhang, Hengyue Pan
arXiv AI
5d ago

LearnPrunerV2: Learnable Progressive Token Pruning for Vision-Language Models

LearnPrunerV2 is a fully learnable token‑pruning framework for Vision‑Language Models that replaces heuristic pruning with lightweight modules in every backbone layer. These modules estimate token importance by combining visual saliency and query relevance via a shadow token, revealing a consistent staircase redundancy pattern across layers. The method introduces Budget‑Deterministic Pruning to set fixed per‑layer budgets, achieving state‑of‑the‑art efficiency while preserving 99.8% of performance even after pruning 77.8% of visual tokens on LLaVA‑v1.5.

By Rinyoichi Takezoe, Yaqian Li, Weiren Wang, Zihao Bo, Huihong Shi, Anzhou Hou, Mo Guang, Jiale Yan, Kaiwen Long
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

LearnPruner: Rethinking Attention-based Token Pruning in Vision Language Models

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

MIMONet: Multi-scale Input and Multi-scale Output Network for Salient Object Detection

MIMONet is a saliency detection model that uses multi‑scale inputs and outputs to better handle objects of varying sizes. It processes three differently sized images through separate encoder branches that exchange information, allowing each branch to learn size‑variation knowledge from the others. A Multi‑scale Perception module further refines features, and a Joint Saliency Loss ensures consistent, well‑preserved boundaries across the multiple saliency maps produced.

By Zhaojian Yao, Wei Gao, Tiesong Zhao, Hui Yuan, Sam Kwong
arXiv AI
Sep 10

STAR-Pro: Stage-Wise Token Adaptive Reduction with Progressive Refinement for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2609.05916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve strong multimodal understanding, but the hundreds to thousands of visual tokens they process impose subs...

By Yichen Guo, Tinghao Wang, Qizhe Zhang, Lingbei Meng, Yuan Zhang, Jiajun Cao, Hao Jiang, Chenwei Wu, Jixian Wu, Sixiang Chen, Tao Luo, Hongyang Cheng, Kai Tang, Chenxi Li, Renyuan Li, Xiande Huang, Wenya Wang, Shanghang Zhang