arXiv Computer Vision

FlashAR: Efficient Post-Training Acceleration for Autoregressive Image Generation

FlashAR is a lightweight post‑training adaptation framework that converts a pre‑trained raster‑scan autoregressive image model into a highly parallel generator using two‑way next‑token prediction. It preserves the original training objective by keeping the horizontal head for row‑wise prediction and adding a lightweight vertical head for column‑wise prediction, with a learnable fusion gate to combine the two predictions. A two‑stage adaptation pipeline—first initializing the vertical head from the pre‑trained model and then jointly fine‑tuning—yields up to a 22.9× speedup for 512×512 image generation while using only 0.05% of the original training data.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Efficient Training with Foresight: Multi-Token Auxiliary Supervision for Autoregressive Image Generation

The paper introduces MTAR, a training framework for autoregressive image generation that enhances performance through multi-token prediction, token-level contrastive regularization, and semantic dropping. These components address sparse supervision, improve representation discriminability, and accelerate training without affecting inference. On ImageNet, MTAR outperforms LlamaGen with lower FID and faster training, achieving comparable results in only a third of the iterations.

By Guo Niu, Xiongfei Yao, Teng Wang, Nannan Zhu
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Argus-Unified: Towards A Compact and Economical Unified Model for Image Understanding and Generation

arXiv:2607. 25527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unifying visual understanding and generation in one model holds immense promise, but remains challenging and expensive due to heavy compute and data demands and conflicts between the visual features needed for these two capabilities.

By Weiming Zhuang, Jiabo Huang, Jingtao Li, Zhizhong Li, Chen Chen, Sina Sajadmanesh, Lingjuan Lyu
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 Machine Learning
Sep 23

GTR: Gated Token Recurrence for Efficient Dense Prediction

The paper introduces Gated Token Recurrence (GTR), a softmax‑free recurrent vision backbone that replaces global softmax attention with gated linear attention, alternating scan directions, and enhanced SwiGLU blocks. GTR is distilled from a DINOv3 teacher using only final‑layer patch‑token alignment, and achieves strong performance on COCO object detection (58.9 box AP) with very low latency (1.908 ms on an RTX 4090). The backbone also transfers to multiple dense prediction tasks and runs efficiently on edge hardware via a specialized CUDA operator and TensorRT deployment.

By Zhe Feng, Longfei Liu, Wei Liu, Kai Chen, Jiangjiang Kong, Wei Zhou, Yifeng Qian, Dexiong Chen, Xuanlong Yu, Xi Shen
arXiv AI
1d ago

GroundAnything: Reconciling Parallel Decoding with Precise Visual Grounding at Flash Speed

GroundAnything is a 4‑B parameter grounding foundation model that combines autoregressive and diffusion approaches to achieve fast parallel decoding while maintaining precise visual grounding. By treating grounding as visual evidence extraction and using blockwise denoising, it allows spatial hypotheses to be generated in parallel and refined iteratively. The model outperforms existing state‑of‑the‑art methods on 30 grounding benchmarks, achieving 72.42% accuracy with its autoregressive variant and 61.75% with entropy‑guided decoding, while also offering significant speedups through optional self‑speculative decoding.

By Qize Yu, Lianrui Fan, Bowen Ping, Xini Ding, Zetian Song, Junbo Niu, Kaixuan Wang, Tianxing Chen, Yue Chen, Minghua He, Yuran Wang, Jie Huang, Haojun Zhang, Min Chen, Hao Li, Wenxuan Song, Ruihai Wu, Xianming Liu, Shilong Liu, Shuchang Zhou, Ping Luo, Shiyu Huang