arXiv Computer Vision

Efficient Quantization-Aware Distillation with Cross-Modal Alignment for Edge Vision-Language Models

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

RAMP: Robust Adaptive Mixed-Precision Quantization for Edge CPU Vision Models

The paper introduces RAMP, a method for robust adaptive mixed‑precision quantization of vision models on edge CPUs. It evaluates 13 sensitivity metrics across four neural networks, finding that Jensen‑Shannon Divergence consistently identifies layers that can be safely quantized. Using K‑Means clustering on these metrics, RAMP achieves near‑lossless accuracy with an average 1.81× speed‑up, while cautioning against excluding low‑speed‑up layers that can fragment the computational graph.

By David Poblaci\'on-Criado, Dario Garcia-Gasulla, Eduardo Quinones
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Argus-Unified: Towards A Compact and Economical Unified Model for Image Understanding and Generation

arXiv:2607. 25527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unifying visual understanding and generation in one model holds immense promise, but remains challenging and expensive due to heavy compute and data demands and conflicts between the visual features needed for these two capabilities.

By Weiming Zhuang, Jiabo Huang, Jingtao Li, Zhizhong Li, Chen Chen, Sina Sajadmanesh, Lingjuan Lyu
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 AI
Sep 2

SARTM: Segment Any RGB Thermal Model with Language aided Distillation

The paper introduces SARTM, a framework that adapts the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for RGB‑thermal (RGB‑T) semantic segmentation. It fine‑tunes SAM with LoRA layers, incorporates language guidance, and employs a Cross‑Modal Knowledge Distillation module to bridge modality gaps. The approach also modifies the segmentation head and adds an auxiliary semantic head, achieving superior performance on MFNET, PST900, and FMB benchmarks.

By Dong Xing, Jinhe Zhang, Hang Yang, Yuqing Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Accuracy is Not Enough: A Divergence-Based Approach to Evaluate Fidelity Loss in Quantized LLMs

The paper argues that relying solely on zero‑shot task accuracy is insufficient for evaluating quantized large language models (LLMs) because accuracy ignores changes in the full predictive distribution. It proposes a distribution‑sensitive framework that measures fidelity loss by computing statistical distances—such as Jensen‑Shannon Divergence and Total Variation Distance—between the full‑vocabulary output distributions of a full‑precision BF16 reference and its quantized counterparts. Experiments across five foundation architectures and four reasoning benchmarks show that these divergence metrics increase with stronger quantization, revealing distributional drift that top‑1 accuracy fails to capture, and suggest that mixed‑precision Q4_K schemes can offer lower divergence than uniform Q4_0 at comparable memory usage.

By Shahzeb Qamar, Lorenz Sparrenberg, Christian Bauckhage, Baha Rababah, Carson Leung, Murat Kantarcioglu, Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Rafet Sifa
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

UVU: Improving Multimodal Understanding via Vision-Language Unified Autoregressive Paradigm

UVU is a vision-language unified autoregressive framework that integrates visual supervision directly into the pre-training stage of multimodal large language models. By using continuous visual encoding and a large-scale iterative hierarchical clustering algorithm to build a pixel-level visual codebook, UVU enables lossless representation of visual inputs and autoregressive generation of pixel-level image tokens alongside textual tokens. This approach synergizes pixel-level visual perception with semantic-level visual understanding, allowing models to internalize visual reconstruction capabilities and improve multimodal understanding performance.

By Zhehan Kan, Xinghua Jiang, Yubo Zhu, Yanlin Liu, Xiaochen Yang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun