FAVE (Foveated Adaptive Visual Encoding) is a lightweight, variable‑resolution Vision Transformer that encodes user‑selected image regions at high acuity while maintaining the image’s native geometry. In controlled experiments on small‑object ImageNet crops, FAVE outperforms a fixed‑resolution ViT by 9.4 top‑1 points while using 12.7× fewer FLOPs. When added as a local branch to FastVLM, FAVE improves TextVQA by 1.60 points and GQA attribute accuracy by 1.31 points, achieving a 3.3× speedup over SmolVLM2-2.2B with only 16 extra local tokens.
By Amitangshu Mukherjee, Kaushik Roy
arXiv:2606. 28551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building performant Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires carefully curating large-scale training datasets, yet the community lacks systematic benchmarks for evaluating such curation strategies.
By Matteo Farina, Vishaal Udandarao, Thao Nguyen, Selim Kuzucu, Maximilian B\"other, Andreas Hochlehnert, Adhiraj Ghosh, Marianna Nezhurina, Karsten Roth, Joschka Struber, Yuhui Zhang, Sebastian Dziadzio, Elaine Sui, Soumya Jahagirdar, Dhruba Ghosh, Hasan Hammoud, Thomas De Min, Simone Caldarella, Jehanzeb Mirza, Sedrick Keh, Mehdi Cherti, Hilde Kuehne, Bernt Schiele, Serena Yeung-Levy, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Federico Tombari, Ana Klimovic, Elisa Ricci, Matthias Bethge, Sewoong Oh, Ameya Prabhu, Alessio Tonioni, Jenia Jitsev, Massimiliano Mancini, Ludwig Schmidt, Nikhil Parthasarathy
arXiv:2610.01640v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) face a fixed-budget trade-off between processing more visual information for fine-grained perception and using a larger...
By Xinye Zhao, Yunkai Dang, Yunchen Wu, Wenbin Li
LensVLM is an inference framework and post‑training recipe that lets Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) process compressed images of text by selectively expanding only the relevant parts back to full resolution. Using Qwen3.5‑9B‑Base, LensVLM achieves accuracy comparable to full‑text models at 4.3× compression and outperforms other compression baselines up to 10.1× across seven text QA benchmarks, while also improving performance on multimodal document and code tasks as compression increases.
By Roy Xie, Dan Friedman, Donghan Yu, Bowen Pan, Christopher Fifty, Jang-Hyun Kim, Xianzhi Du, Zhe Gan, Vivek Rathod, Bhuwan Dhingra
The paper introduces the Capability-Driven Multimodal Scaling Law, a cross-family framework that predicts vision-language model (VLM) benchmark accuracy from a low-dimensional textual capability score extracted via PCA. By training over 150 VLMs on 34 large language models across seven families, the authors demonstrate that the law accurately extrapolates transfer rates from 8B to 72B‑parameter backbones, predicts full training trajectories, and generalizes to unseen model families. The study also reveals actionable insights, such as certain textual benchmarks negatively correlating with multimodal performance and base LLMs outperforming instruction-tuned counterparts as VLM backbones due to higher absorption rates.
By Ziran Li, Qiang Wang, Zhengyu Chen, Shanglin Lei, Borun Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai
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.
By Ahmadreza Jeddi, Minh Ngoc Le, Amirhossein Kazerouni, Hakki Can Karaimer, Hue Nguyen, Iqbal Mohomed, Michael Brudno, Alex Levinshtein, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Babak Taati, Radek Grzeszczuk
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
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: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...
By Yufei Xue, Yushi Huang, Lunjie Zhu, Jiawei Shao, Jun Zhang
arXiv:2607. 18615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine unlearning for vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored.
By Zijie Liu, Jinhao Duan, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen
arXiv:2603.16932v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) typically process images at a native high-resolution, forcing a trade-off between accuracy and computational ef...
By Nimrod Shabtay, Moshe Kimhi, Artem Spector, Sivan Haray, Ehud Rivlin, Chaim Baskin, Raja Giryes, Eli Schwartz
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