arXiv Computer Vision

Task Alignment: A Simple Proxy for Practical Model Merging Across Diverse Vision Tasks

The paper introduces the task alignment proxy, a method that accelerates hyperparameter selection for merging models fine‑tuned on diverse vision tasks. It addresses the challenge of training heterogeneous decoders, which makes traditional downstream performance evaluation costly. By using the proxy, the authors demonstrate that model merging can be applied efficiently to multi‑task vision models beyond CLIP‑based classification.

arXiv AI
Oct 2

VETO: Video Efficient Token Optimization for Vision Language Models

VETO (Video Efficient Token Optimization for Vision Language Models) is a plug‑in that reduces the quadratic cost of visual tokens in long‑video inference by applying dual‑axis compression: an intra‑frame compressor merges semantically similar tokens within each frame, and an inter‑frame compressor merges temporally redundant frames. By first compressing spatial dimensions, VETO lowers the cost of subsequent global temporal matching, surpassing single‑axis methods and achieving up to 45% faster inference on models such as LLaVA‑OneVision‑7B while maintaining or improving accuracy. The approach is universally applicable across LLaVA‑OneVision, InternVL‑2.5, and LongVA, preserving or enhancing zero‑shot accuracy even under extreme token budgets.

By Gueter Josmy Faure, Hao Ping Wang, Min-Hung Chen, Winston H. Hsu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Model Specific Task Similarity for Vision Language Model Selection via Layer Conductance

The paper introduces a method for selecting the best vision‑language model for a downstream task by analyzing the internal dynamics of the visual encoder. It represents each task with layer‑wise conductance and uses an entropy‑regularized alignment to derive a target‑conditioned block importance distribution. The proposed Directional Conductance Divergence (DCD) metric captures asymmetric transferability, enabling accurate prediction of model rankings without direct inference, and achieves a 14.7% NDCG@5 improvement over SWAB on 48 VLMs across 21 datasets.

By Wei Yang, Hong Xie, Tao Tan, Xin Li, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

Prune Once: Retraining-Free Task-Agnostic Pruning for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2608. 06901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable generalization across diverse multimodal tasks through large-scale pre-training, yet their rapidly increasing computational and memory requirements pose significant challenges for deployment in constrained environments.

By Minseok Kang, Hyunwoo Kim, Chanyoung Kim, Minwoo Kim, Jaekoo Lee, Dahuin Jung
arXiv AI
Jul 21

A${}^2$BM: Alignment-Aware Bridge Matching for Image-to-Image Translation

arXiv:2607. 16294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Paired image-to-image translation underpins a wide range of computer vision tasks, including image editing, sensor translation, and domain adaptation.

By Aimi Okabayashi (UBS Vannes), Georges Le Bellier (LIP, CEDRIC - VERTIGO), Nicolas Audebert (LaSTIG, IGN, CEDRIC - VERTIGO), Charlotte Pelletier (OBELIX), Thomas Corpetti (LETG - Rennes), Nicolas Courty (OBELIX)
arXiv Computer Vision
1d ago

OptIMerge: Optimization-Based Merging of Diffusion Models

OptIMerge is an optimization-based framework that merges multiple image‑to‑image diffusion models fine‑tuned for dense, pixel‑accurate tasks. Instead of naive scalar averaging, it learns lightweight, architecture‑aware merger coefficients—such as low‑rank feature alignment for attention layers and per‑kernel coefficients for convolutional layers—by minimizing a multi‑task diffusion loss on a small image set. The approach keeps the expert models frozen, uses less than 0.4% of the network parameters, and achieves multi‑task performance comparable to joint training while outperforming zero‑shot model soups.

By Viraj Shah, Ashwini Pokle, Peyman Milanfar, Mauricio Delbracio, Hossein Talebi