Attention Sinks in VLMs Are Borrowed, Not Seen
arXiv:2610.15855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study how to detect and mitigate visual attention sinks in vision-language models (VLMs). Visual attention sinks are image tokens that absorb a larg...
The paper introduces QK Product Steering, a data‑free, training‑free method that edits the query‑key product in vision‑language models to reduce object hallucination. By suppressing a few dominant singular modes in selected middle layers and mapping the edited product back to query weights, the approach lowers hallucination rates without affecting inference cost. Experiments on three GQA‑based VLMs show a 4.0% average reduction in CHAIR$_s$, with the effect localized to symmetric mutual‑attention channels.
arXiv:2610.15855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study how to detect and mitigate visual attention sinks in vision-language models (VLMs). Visual attention sinks are image tokens that absorb a larg...
arXiv:2606. 04032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformers have become the standard solution for various AI tasks, with the query, key, and value (QKV) attention formulation playing a central role.
arXiv:2608.23921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent Vision-Language Models encode high-resolution images into long visual token sequences, incurring prohibitive prefill costs. To compress them, ex...
arXiv:2608.22996v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on diverse vision-language tasks, but transformer-based visual encoders split images into fixed-resolution s...
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...
arXiv:2607.28627v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long visual contexts challenge vision-language models: performance degrades as the number of distractors grows, and processing all tokens at...
RAVE (Re-Allocating Visual Attention) is a lightweight pair‑gating mechanism that adds a learned query‑key bias to pre‑softmax attention scores over visual keys, derived from pre‑RoPE query and key features. It requires no architectural changes to the backbone and can be trained end‑to‑end with the rest of the model. Across multiple multimodal benchmarks, RAVE improves standard attention by an average of 3 points, especially on perception‑intensive tasks such as multilingual OCR, chart understanding, document VQA, and scene text VQA.
arXiv:2606. 01294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Linear attention reduces the quadratic cost of softmax attention by maintaining a recurrent fast-weight state, but it consistently lags on in-context retrieval and long-context tasks.
arXiv:2609.37581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding and reasoning but often incur substantial inference costs due to the large number of visu...
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on diverse vision-language tasks, but transformer-based visual encoders split images into fixed-resolution sub-images, compromising object integrity in light...
arXiv:2508.03351v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse language tasks, motivating their extension to vision-la...
QCPruner is a training‑free visual token pruning method that conditions both token selection and representation on the query via bilateral utility weighting. It fuses keyword‑matched query anchors with cross‑modal cues to compute a nonnegative facility‑location objective that is monotone and submodular, guaranteeing a (1‑1/e) greedy approximation. Across multiple multimodal large language models, QCPruner consistently outperforms existing pruning methods, achieving over 96% of unpruned performance even with very few tokens retained.