Large language model (LLM)-based lossless image compression methods typically represent pixel data through the native text interface of a pretrained model, converting pixel values into token sequences that the LLM processes through its vocabulary head. This design shows that pretrained language models can provide probability estimates for image coding, but it also couples compression to tokenizer behavior, vocabulary-specific numeric tokens, and model-family-specific adaptation.
Vision-language models commonly project all tokens produced by a pretrained vision encoder into a large language model. However, final-layer features can discard text, local attributes, and spatial relationships, while high-resolution inputs substantially increase context length and inference latency.
arXiv:2512. 08240v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) rely on hundreds of visual tokens, leading to high computational and memory costs.
arXiv:2608.28687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models have significantly improved the performance ceiling of image lossy compression at low bitrates by exploiting learned priors. However,...
arXiv:2609.39222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-compression tokenizers are essential for scaling latent image generative models. However, aggressive compression creates a fundamental tradeoff be...
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.
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.
PixelUMM is an encoder‑free model that unifies image and video understanding and generation directly in pixel space. It represents images as spatial patches and videos as spatiotemporal tubelets, feeding both through single‑layer linear projections into a shared multimodal backbone. The Mixture‑of‑Transformers architecture blends shared attention with task‑specific parameters, enabling autoregressive text prediction, pixel‑space flow matching, and clean‑pixel video generation, and experiments show competitive performance across tasks while providing design insights for future pixel‑space multimodal models.
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.
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.
In video understanding, vision-language models (VLMs) must ingest massive numbers of visual tokens, causing the computational and memory cost of the prefill stage to rise sharply. Such visual sequences are highly redundant along the spatio-temporal dimension, yet a high compression ratio is often accompanied by the loss of critical details.
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.
The paper introduces RAE-CoD, a diffusion-based compression method that operates in a representation autoencoder space to preserve recognizable content even at extremely low bitrates. It addresses the problem of semantic collapse observed in existing codecs when the bitrate approaches zero, showing that reconstruction losses conflict with semantic objectives and that VAE diffusion models lose efficiency in preserving semantics. Experiments on MSCOCO-30K demonstrate that RAE-CoD outperforms competitors, reducing VFM feature MSE and Fréchet Distance ratios by at least 25.7% and 69.1% at 0.001–0.008 bpp while maintaining stable recognizability and quality.