arXiv Computer Vision

RAVE: Re-Allocating Visual Attention in Large Multimodal Models

RAVE (Re-Allocating Visual Attention) is a lightweight pair‑gating mechanism that adds a learned query‑key bias to pre‑softmax attention scores over visual keys, derived from pre‑RoPE query and key features. It requires no architectural changes to the backbone and can be trained end‑to‑end with the rest of the model. Across multiple multimodal benchmarks, RAVE improves standard attention by an average of 3 points, especially on perception‑intensive tasks such as multilingual OCR, chart understanding, document VQA, and scene text VQA.

arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Semantic Head Specialization Guides Hybrid ViT Attention for Multimodal LLMs

The paper introduces Semantic Head Specialization (SHS), a phenomenon where Vision Transformer (ViT) attention heads specialize as either object- or background-focused, most evident under full attention. It proposes the SHS-Index to quantify this specialization, demonstrating its ability to distinguish full-attention from chunk-window ViTs and its strong correlation with downstream benchmark performance. Leveraging insights into window interaction, token serialization, and local softmax allocation, the authors design Ariadne Attention, a hybrid attention mechanism that matches full-attention performance on 22 image and video tasks while reducing attention compute by 6.5×.

By Chenhong He, Lei Li, Shicheng Li, Hanglong Lv, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tong Yang, Shuhuai Ren
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

Spectral Query-Key Product Weight Steering for Training-Free VLM Hallucination Mitigation

The paper introduces QK Product Steering, a data‑free, training‑free method that edits the query‑key product in vision‑language models to reduce object hallucination. By suppressing a few dominant singular modes in selected middle layers and mapping the edited product back to query weights, the approach lowers hallucination rates without affecting inference cost. Experiments on three GQA‑based VLMs show a 4.0% average reduction in CHAIR$_s$, with the effect localized to symmetric mutual‑attention channels.

By Karn Tiwari, Varnith Chordia, Prathosh A P
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

VinciCoder: Unifying Multimodal Code Generation via Coarse-to-fine Visual Reinforcement Learning

VinciCoder is a unified framework for multimodal code generation that addresses the limitations of single-task models by training on a large-scale curated corpus of 1.3 M direct generation pairs and 300 k visual‑refinement tasks. It introduces a coarse‑to‑fine Visual Reinforcement Learning (ViRL) approach that uses visual similarity across multi‑scale patches to provide an implementation‑agnostic reward, improving alignment between rendered outputs and input visuals. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show VinciCoder outperforms existing methods, and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of ViRL.

By Xuanle Zhao, Deyang Jiang, Zhixiong Zeng, Lei Chen, Haoyue Yang, Haibo Qiu, Jing Huang, Yufeng Zhong, Liming Zheng, Yilin Cao, Lin Ma
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 3

Reconstructing Content with Collaborative Attention for Universal Multimodal Representation Learning

arXiv:2603. 01471v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal embedding models, rooted in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), have yielded significant performance improvements across diverse tasks such as retrieval and classification.

By Jiahan Chen, Da Li, Hengran Zhang, Yinqiong Cai, Lixin Su, Jiafeng Guo, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin, Keping Bi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Reconstructing Content via Collaborative Attention to Improve Multimodal Embedding Quality

arXiv:2603. 01471v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal embedding models, rooted in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), have yielded significant performance improvements across diverse tasks such as retrieval and classification.

By Jiahan Chen, Da Li, Hengran Zhang, Yinqiong Cai, Lixin Su, Jiafeng Guo, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin, Keping Bi