arXiv AI

Gated Relational Alignment via Confidence-based Distillation for Efficient VLMs

arXiv:2601. 22709v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong multimodal performance but are costly to deploy, and post-training quantization often causes significant accuracy loss.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Token-Budget Distillation: Transferring Full-Token Semantics to Compressed Video Vision-Language Models

Token-Budget Distillation (TBD) is a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework that adapts video vision‑language models to a fixed token budget. It freezes the pretrained backbone, updates only LoRA adapters, and incorporates FlashVID visual token compression. TBD uses a dual‑path teacher‑student design with full‑token supervision and compressed student optimization, enabling the student to recover full‑token semantics while remaining efficient under aggressive token reduction.

By Xiaoyang Guo, Guoping Luo, Jusheng Zhang, Keze Wang, Wenhao Wang
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 Machine Learning
Aug 10

{\Omega}-QVLA: Robust Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models via Composite Rotation and Per-step Scaling

arXiv:2605. 28803v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models unify perception, reasoning, and control within a single policy, yet their multi-billion-parameter backbones and diffusion-based action heads make on-device deployment prohibitively expensive.

By Xinyu Wang, Mingze Li, Sicheng Lyu, Dongxiu Liu, Kaicheng Yang, Ziyu Zhao, Yufei Cui, Xiao-Wen Chang, Peng Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

BARD: Bridging AutoRegressive and Diffusion Vision-Language Models Via Highly Efficient Progressive Block Merging and Stage-Wise Distillation

arXiv:2604. 16514v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive vision-language models (VLMs) deliver strong multimodal capability, but their token-by-token decoding imposes a fundamental inference bottleneck.

By Baoyou Chen, Hanchen Xia, Peng Tu, Haojun Shi, Liwei Zhang, Yuxuan Yao, Weihao Yuan, Siyu Zhu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

LLaVAFlow: Preserving Latent Alignment Flow for Parameter-Efficient Multimodal Fine-Tuning

LLaVAFlow is an information‑theoretic distillation framework designed to preserve cross‑modal alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models during visual instruction tuning. It compresses the mutual information between extracted relations and MLLM embeddings to refine alignment flow, and then maximizes mutual information between pretrained and fine‑tuned alignment flows to transfer compact alignment information. Experiments demonstrate that LLaVAFlow effectively maintains alignment flow, improving downstream performance and generalization.

By Muyao Yuan, Muyan Jiao, Jiangyong Ying, Weizhan Zhang, Yuanhong Zhang, Lan Ma, Yuan Gao, Haipeng Du