arXiv Machine Learning

Activation Quantization of Vision Encoders Needs Prefixing Registers

arXiv:2510. 04547v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large pretrained vision encoders are central to multimodal intelligence, powering applications from on-device vision processing to 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
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 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 Machine Learning
Aug 24

Llama-Mobile: Efficient 2.7-Bit Quantization of VLMs

The paper introduces Llama-Mobile, a framework that quantizes vision‑language models for efficient mobile deployment. It uses a quantization pipeline that generates training data from the model itself, eliminating the need for the original training setup, and employs a novel 2.7‑bit‑per‑parameter format optimized for Arm CPUs. Applying this method, the authors compress the Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct model to 3.7 GB with 8‑bit activations while maintaining strong performance on visual question answering tasks.

By Luka Ribar, Jeevan Bhoot, Douglas Orr
arXiv AI
Sep 2

SinkPruner: Sink-Free Visual Token Pruning for Multimodal Large Language Models

SinkPruner is a training‑free framework that prunes visual tokens for multimodal large language models by first removing high‑norm redundant tokens with a visual sanitizer and then selectively keeping tokens that align with the text query using a text‑guided pruner. The coarse‑to‑fine design reduces attention sink and dispersion, enabling an 89% token reduction while preserving 96.5% of LLaVA‑1.5’s performance and 91.8% of Qwen2.5‑VL’s performance across twelve image‑language and four video‑language benchmarks. The visual sanitizer also improves existing pruning methods, showing strong transferability.

By Shiyu Li, Zi-Yuan Hu, Shijia Huang, Yanyang Li, Yiwu Zhong, Liwei Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

VQ-Transplant: Efficient VQ-Module Integration for Pre-trained Visual Tokenizers

VQ-Transplant is a framework that allows new vector‑quantization (VQ) modules to be inserted into frozen, pre‑trained visual tokenizers without retraining the entire model. By preserving all encoder‑decoder parameters and adding a lightweight decoder adaptation trained for only five epochs on ImageNet‑1k, the method mitigates decoder‑quantization mismatch. Experiments show that VQ-Transplant achieves near state‑of‑the‑art reconstruction fidelity for industry‑level models such as VAR while cutting training costs by 95%.

By Xianghong Fang, Yuan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Tim G. J. Rudner