arXiv Machine Learning

Parabolic Positional Encoding: A Vision-Centric, Principled, Extrapolatable, and General Approach

The paper introduces Parabolic Positional Encoding (PaPE), a parabola‑based method for encoding positions of vision tokens in attention‑based models. PaPE is designed to respect vision‑specific properties such as translation and rotation invariance, distance decay, directionality, and context awareness. Experiments on ImageNet‑1K and eight other datasets across four modalities show that PaPE extrapolates well—improving performance by up to 10.5 points over the next best encoding—and generally matches or surpasses baseline encodings.

arXiv AI
Sep 21

Visual Navigation Transformer with Pose Attention

arXiv:2609.21212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learned navigation policies typically consume observations as a temporally ordered history, with positional encodings tying each observation to when...

By Beiming Li, Jaime Romero, Jonathan Diller, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 8

RayRoPE: Projective Ray Positional Encoding for Multi-view Attention

arXiv:2601. 15275v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study positional encodings for multi-view transformers that process tokens from a set of posed input images, and seek a mechanism that encodes patches uniquely, allows SE(3)-invariant attention with multi-frequency similarity, and can adapt to the geometry of the underlying 3D scene.

By Yu Wu, Minsik Jeon, Jen-Hao Rick Chang, Oncel Tuzel, Shubham Tulsiani
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Constructive Distortion: Improving MLLMs with Attention-Guided Image Warping

The paper introduces AttWarp, a lightweight technique that uses a multimodal large language model’s cross‑modal attention to perform rectilinear warping of input images at test time. By reallocating spatial resolution toward query‑relevant regions without altering model weights or architecture, AttWarp preserves global context while making small objects and subtle relationships easier for the model to read. Experiments on five benchmarks and four MLLMs show consistent accuracy gains, improved compositional reasoning, and reduced hallucinations compared to baseline image‑manipulation methods.

By Dwip Dalal, Gautam Vashishtha, Utkarsh Mishra, Jeonghwan Kim, Madhav Kanda, Hyeonjeong Ha, Svetlana Lazebnik, Heng Ji, Unnat Jain
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

LearnPruner: Rethinking Attention-based Token Pruning in Vision Language Models

LearnPruner rethinks token pruning in vision‑language models by addressing shortcomings of attention mechanisms in vision encoders and large language models. The method uses a two‑stage approach: first a learnable pruning module removes redundant vision tokens after the vision encoder, then only task‑relevant tokens are kept in the LLM’s middle layer. Experiments show that LearnPruner retains about 95% of performance while using only 5.5% of vision tokens, achieving a 3.2× speed‑up.

By Rinyoichi Takezoe, Yaqian Li, Zihao Bo, Anzhou Hou, Mo Guang, Kaiwen Long
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
Oct 16

DK-VLM: Geometry as Position for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

DK‑VLM introduces Dual‑Kernel Attention, where a visual token’s attention is computed from both its input position and its geometric position derived from 3D points and camera poses. A semantic kernel preserves pretrained attention while a geometric kernel modulates attention via point displacements and relative view transformations, with a learned gate fusing the two. The model also employs Reference‑Frame Composition supervision to update its reference frame across successive judgments, achieving top scores on six spatial benchmarks and strong performance on VSI‑Bench and ReVSI‑32.

By Han Su, Meng Tian, Tianyu Huang, Mingyu Gao, Lennox Wei, Dongxu Li, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Xiaohe Wu, Wangmeng Zuo