arXiv AI

Learning Hierarchical Patch Splitting Policies for Faster Vision Transformers

The paper introduces Split Policy Learned Image Tokenization (SPLIT), a method that learns to allocate token resolution based on the model’s interpretation of task-relevant information rather than raw pixel statistics. SPLIT produces shorter token sequences while matching the accuracy of full-resolution Vision Transformers on classification tasks, and it also achieves competitive performance on dense prediction benchmarks such as COCO and ADE20K.

arXiv AI
Oct 15

Scaling Vision Transformers Without Training: Prune-and-Merge Token Compression

The paper introduces Prune-and-Merge ViT, a training‑free token compression framework for Vision Transformers that combines class‑attention pruning with similarity‑based merging to reduce computational cost while preserving semantic information. It evaluates robustness using two new metrics—Relative Accuracy Drop (RAD) and Prediction Flip Rate (PFR)—and shows that the method maintains or improves accuracy on pretrained ViT and DeiT models compared to existing token reduction techniques. The authors also argue that the hybrid approach does not induce hallucination‑like behavior and keeps predictions stable under common image transformations.

By Vatsal, Soumil Malhotra, Priyanshu Chahal, Sanjeev Kumar
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 28

DART: Differentiable Dynamic Adaptive Region Tokenizer for Vision Foundation Models

DART is a fully differentiable Dynamic Adaptive Region Tokenizer that replaces fixed‑grid tokenizers in vision models. It uses learnable region scores and quantile‑based partitioning to create content‑aware patches of varying sizes, allocating more tokens to information‑rich areas. In experiments, a DART‑equipped DeiT‑Small matches the performance of a larger DeiT‑Base while nearly doubling inference speed, and the approach also benefits dense prediction and video tasks.

By Shicheng Yin, Kaixuan Yin, Yang Liu, Weixing Chen, Liang Lin
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Decoder-Agnostic Token Merging for Vision Transformers: A Systematic Study of G2TM

The paper studies Graph-Guided Token Merging (G2TM), a module that reduces token count in Vision Transformers. It evaluates G2TM across multiple segmentation frameworks and decoder types, finding that its performance gains are tied to the encoder rather than the decoder. The authors report consistent reductions in GFLOPs (22‑47%) and throughput improvements (up to 74%) on ADE20K, with optimal hyperparameters depending mainly on backbone pre‑training and target dataset.

By Victor Bercy, Martyna Poreba, Michal Szczepanski, Samia Bouchafa
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

ProgResViT: Progressive Resolution and Width for Adaptive Vision Transformers

ProgResViT is an input‑adaptive Vision Transformer that processes images progressively across multiple rounds, starting with a low‑resolution image and a narrow subnetwork and refining the prediction with higher resolution and a wider subnetwork if needed. The method introduces Progress‑Conditioned Soft Gating (PSG) to share a single backbone across rounds while conditioning token fusion and layer outputs on the current round, block, and input resolution. Experiments on DeiT show improved accuracy‑compute trade‑offs compared to adaptive‑width, adaptive‑depth, and dynamic‑token baselines, and the design also benefits self‑supervised DINO representations and downstream semantic segmentation.

By Ali Hojjat, Janek Haberer, Olaf Landsiedel
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