arXiv AI

Can a Lightweight Multimodal Model Estimate LLM Reasoning Performance? A Study for Compute-Optimal Document Inference

The paper introduces BudgetDoc, a multimodal benchmark that explicitly supervises the trade‑off between inference budget and performance across three document tasks. Using this benchmark, the authors train DRB, a lightweight 1‑billion‑parameter pre‑flight estimator (SigLIP‑2 + Qwen3‑0.6B) that predicts ordinal model performance for different budget levels and achieves a weighted F1 of 0.753. When DRB dynamically allocates reasoning budgets to five frontier models on three datasets, it matches or improves F1 scores compared to always‑maximum‑budget baselines in 9 of 15 configurations while dramatically cutting cost, and preliminary tests suggest it may generalize to cross‑model selection.

arXiv AI
1d ago

Selection-Based Structured Reasoning: Toward Efficient Multimodal Search Agents

arXiv:2610.01892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal agents commonly generate free-form reasoning before each action. For small models, limited model capacity can result in lengthy reasoning...

By Feiyu Gavin Zhu, Xiaoyu Zhu, Jiqi Yang, Rui Yang, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Yancheng Wang, Xinke Deng, Jean Oh, Reid Simmons, Joerg Liebelt, Xiang Kong, Zhongyu Jiang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

ET-Prune: Evidence-Aware Dynamic Budgeting for Visual Token Pruning in Text-Rich MLLMs

ET‑Prune is a training‑free framework that dynamically allocates visual token budgets in multimodal large language models based on question‑conditioned evidence. It protects text‑like spatial regions, converts evidence uncertainty into a token floor, and progressively prunes concentrated evidence while retaining diffuse or text‑dense tokens. In six backbone‑benchmark comparisons, ET‑Prune matches or outperforms other pruned methods while keeping roughly half the visual tokens, achieving notable gains on OCRBench‑v2 and MMBench v1.1.

By Zizhong Ding, Junxian Li, Kai Liu, Shaoqiu Zhang, Xiao Xiao, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

FOVEA: Focused On-Demand Visual Evidence Adaptation for Cache-Friendly Multimodal Speculative Decoding

FOVEA introduces a cache‑friendly, on‑demand visual evidence adaptation for multimodal speculative decoding, enabling a lightweight draft model to dynamically retrieve a bounded subset of visual memory based on a cumulative‑mass rule. The retrieved visual readout is fused with the draft hidden state via a lightweight gated residual correction, avoiding the insertion of visual tokens into the autoregressive context. Experiments on various vision‑language backbones and benchmarks show that FOVEA improves draft acceptance and speeds up end‑to‑end decoding by up to 2.13× compared to traditional autoregressive decoding.

By Hengjie Zhu, Dayan Wu, Zihao Zhang, Xinze Liu, Jingxuan Yu, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang, Ding Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 28

MM-ShiftKV: Decode-Aware Prefill-Stage KV Selection for Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 22586v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Key-Value (KV) caching is essential for efficient inference in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), yet its memory footprint grows linearly with context length and becomes a major bottleneck due to the large number of visual tokens.

By Jinsong Shu, Chenyang Wu, Zhongle Xie, Baokun Wang, Lidan Shou
arXiv AI
Jul 17

Stop Thinking, Start Looking: Efficient Post-Training for Multimodal Document Question Answering via Reasoning-Free Alignment

arXiv:2607. 14682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient multimodal document question answering with explicit visual grounding, locating the precise document region that supports each answer remains an open challenge.

By Harikrishnan P M, Goutham Vignesh, Ganesh Parab, Saisubramaniam Gopalakrishnan, Vishal Vaddina, Varun V, Rohit Agrawal
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Data-Efficient Curation for Multimodal Reasoning under Fixed Training Protocols

arXiv:2601. 10922v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study data curation for multimodal reasoning in a fixed-protocol fine-tuning regime, where the base model, optimizer, training schedule, and evaluation pipeline are held constant and the main degree of freedom is the training data.

By Yosub Shin, Michael Buriek, Boris Sobolev, Pavel Bushuyeu, Vikas Kumar, Haoyang Xu, Samuel Watson, Igor Molybog
arXiv AI
Sep 3

DocHop: Benchmarking Out-of-domain Multi-hop Reasoning in Information-Dense Documents

DocHop is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on integrated chart‑context reasoning within document‑style images. The benchmark presents narrative text that imposes multi‑step compositional constraints, while charts supply the data needed to answer questions grounded in semantic reference labels. It contains 2,074 examples across six task categories, generated via a stochastic logic‑first pipeline that controls reasoning depth and visual density, and shows a large performance gap between humans (over 90% accuracy) and the best models (62.83%).

By Zhuoran Yu, Le Thien Phuc Nguyen, Jaden Park, Xinyi Gu, Zexue He, Soochahn Lee, Rogerio Feris, Yong Jae Lee