arXiv AI

CoVisco: Codec-Native Vision Encoder with Native Token Compression for Unified Image-Video Understanding

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 Computer Vision
Aug 31

Visual Token Coding for Video Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces Visual Token Coding (VTC), a token compression method for video multimodal large language models that mimics classical video coding by predicting I/P frames and measuring residuals to reduce token redundancy. VTC is extended with dynamic features—Dynamic Resolution Input, Dynamic Token Allocation, and Spatial Coverage Top‑K—forming VTC_Dy, which can be applied to existing MLLMs without additional tuning. Experiments on three MLLMs and multiple video benchmarks show that VTC_Dy retains over 100% of average performance with a 50% token budget and 97.8% with a 25% budget, while the code is publicly available.

By Chenxin Fang, Tao Chen, JunChao You, Jun Peng, Yiyi Zhou, Rongrong Ji
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

CoFiE: Coarse-to-Fine Evidence Selection for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding

CoFiE introduces a two‑stage evidence selection framework for streaming video understanding, separating a coarse, query‑agnostic filtering of visually distinctive frames from a fine, query‑specific refinement during LLM prefill. By filtering out redundant frames before expensive vision encoding, CoFiE reduces end‑to‑end latency while maintaining high accuracy. The method achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on benchmarks such as StreamingBench and OvO‑Bench, improving accuracy by up to 3.15% and inference speed by up to 2.54× compared to prior approaches.

By Jing Jiang, Yiran Ling, Ruonan Li, Dimitrios Stamoulis, Jie Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Token-Budget Distillation: Transferring Full-Token Semantics to Compressed Video Vision-Language Models

Token-Budget Distillation (TBD) is a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework that adapts video vision‑language models to a fixed token budget. It freezes the pretrained backbone, updates only LoRA adapters, and incorporates FlashVID visual token compression. TBD uses a dual‑path teacher‑student design with full‑token supervision and compressed student optimization, enabling the student to recover full‑token semantics while remaining efficient under aggressive token reduction.

By Xiaoyang Guo, Guoping Luo, Jusheng Zhang, Keze Wang, Wenhao Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Token-Oriented Semantic Communication with Pretrained Vision Transformers

The paper introduces a token‑oriented semantic communication framework that transmits only task‑relevant image latents instead of full token embeddings, reducing communication cost and improving interoperability. It leverages a spatial alignment between vision transformer patch tokens and learned image compression latents, enabling token‑level relevance estimation and selective transmission. Experiments on ImageNet demonstrate a superior rate–accuracy trade‑off compared to existing semantic communication methods and hand‑crafted codecs.

By Jiwoong Im, Minwoo Kim, Jaeho Lee, Yo-Seb Jeon, Yongjune Kim
arXiv AI
Jun 12

HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers

arXiv:2606. 13289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Holistic visual tokenizers are fundamental to unified multimodal models (UMMs) as they map diverse visual inputs into a unified representation space.

By Guozhen Zhang, Xuerui Qiu, Yutao Cui, Tianhui Song, Changlin Li, Junzhe Li, Tao Huang, Xiao Zhang, Yang Li, Jianbing Wu, Miles Yang, Zhao Zhong, Liefeng Bo, Limin Wang