arXiv AI

AVIS: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 11576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

VisCache: Visual KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Vision Large Language Model Inference

VisCache introduces a two-stage, plug‑and‑play framework for pruning visual key‑value caches in Vision Large Language Models without retraining. The first stage filters out temporally redundant keyframes, while the second stage, PruneKV, applies a parabolic layer‑wise budget and asymmetric update to selectively prune keys and fuse values, preserving essential context. Experiments show up to 2.35× speedup and significant memory savings with only 19–28% of the original cache retained, outperforming existing baselines.

By Lyuke Wang, Zhuo Li, Guangxu Zhu
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
Aug 28

Multi-Image Visual Token Pruning in Large Visual Language Models

The paper introduces Adaptive Visual Token Pruning (AVTP), a training‑free framework that dynamically selects pruning layers and ratios for large vision‑language models (LVLMs) when processing multiple image sequences. By analyzing visual attention distributions across different LVLM architectures, AVTP adapts token retention to image importance, enabling efficient inference without relying on attention‑based computations incompatible with FlashAttention. Experiments show significant speedups—up to 2× for Qwen3VL‑8B—while preserving or even improving accuracy on multi‑image benchmarks.

By Rongyang Zhang, Chengqiang Lu, Cong Li, Hongchao Gu, Tingjia Shen, Xuyang Zhi, Qimeng Wang, Yan Gao, Yi Wu, Yao Hu, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Not All Attention Heads Contribute to Critical Visual Token Selection: Head-Aware Pruning Matters More

The paper shows that only a small subset of attention heads in vision-language models is responsible for selecting critical visual tokens. By pruning tokens based on similarity before LLM reasoning and then applying head‑aware pruning during reasoning, the proposed ProViP framework achieves high task performance with significant speedups. Experiments on LLaVA‑1.5‑7B demonstrate 95.9% performance retention and a 1.62× inference speedup at an 88.9% pruning ratio.

By Chaofang Ma, Lin Jiang, Carol Jingyi Li, Xingyu Liu, Zeyu Li, Jiang Xu, Wei Zhang
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 14

Visual Access Boundaries in Vision-Language Model Reasoning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.

arXiv AI
Jul 15

Visual Access Boundaries in Vision-Language Model Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 12815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces.

By Hiroto Osaka, Shohei Taniguchi, Gouki Minegishi, Kai Yamashita, Masahiro Suzuki, Yutaka Matsuo
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning

VBVR-Pro is a closed‑loop testbed that enables native visual reasoning through generation, offering 300 procedurally generated tasks that scale training and allow strong transfer to external benchmarks. It supplies verifiable reward scorers based on deterministic, task‑specific rules, outperforming VLM‑as‑a‑judge approaches and providing reliable signals for reinforcement learning. The suite also facilitates controlled modality studies, revealing that video generation excels at persistent spatiotemporal tracking while interleaved generation offers a compute‑efficient alternative, and highlights the importance of vision‑native trajectories for reasoning.

By Junxiang Xu, Ruisi Wang, Fanyi Pu, Maijunxian Wang, Ran Ji, Tongxi Zhou, Chenyang Gu, Jing Zuo, Hongcan Xiao, Yimeng Geng, Wanqi Yin, Wei Chen, Oscar Qian, Zhengan Yan, Ziqi Huang, Haiwen Diao, Liang Pan, Bo Li, Xiangyu Fan, Dezhi Luo, Fengyuan Yu, Zehong Zhao, Qingying Gao, Tinghui Zhu, Yilan Zhang, Jingqi Tong, Pinyuan Feng, Zhengze Jiang, Letian Wang, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Jieneng Chen, Sonia Joseph, Constantin Venhoff, Saman Motamed, Mengyue Yang, Chandra Sripada, Alan Yuille, Philip Torr, Lvmin Zhang, Vikash Kumar, Daniel Khashabi, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Rapha\"el Milli\`ere, Vincent C. M\"uller, Anyi Rao, Quan Wang, Ziwei Liu, Dahua Lin, Lei Yang, Hokin Deng, Zhongang Cai