arXiv Computer Vision

VTC-AUDIT: An Interventional Reliability Audit for Visual-Token Compression under Paired Image Shifts

arXiv AI
Aug 11

Not All Visual Tokens Are Equally Safe to Remove:Consequence-Sensitive Visual Token Compression

arXiv:2608. 09176v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual token compression for vision--language models (VLMs) has largely relied on criteria such as attention, redundancy, and uncertainty to maximize average accuracy under a fixed compute budget, implicitly assuming that all errors carry equal cost.

By Jingbo Wen, Liang He, Mingyu Cao, Haoyu Wang, Minxuan Hu, Kangning Cui, Xilu Wang
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 AI
Oct 5

Corrupted but Correct: Why Vision-Language Models Lie to Themselves Internally

The paper demonstrates that a targeted adversarial perturbation can reduce a vision‑language model’s training loss to near zero for a fixed target caption, yet the same model, when generating freely, still produces the correct description. This phenomenon, termed the train/inference gap, is traced to a single autoregressive step where the target token’s rank is fixed across all images, and further analysis shows that the language decoder, rather than the visual encoder, determines whether the corrupted signal is amplified or suppressed. The study uses a controlled two‑stage PGD attack on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B‑Instruct and evaluates the effect on 200 held‑out COCO images, revealing that adversarial robustness in autoregressive VLMs largely depends on the language decoder’s prior. whyItMatters":"The findings suggest that defenses and faithfulness evaluations for deployed vision‑language models should focus on the language decoder rather than the visual encoder, as the former is the key determinant of robustness to adversarial perturbations."

By Arun Josephraj Arokiaraj, Zekun Wu, Adriano Koshiyama
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

From Token Importance to Conditional Removability: Rethinking Visual Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper argues that token importance alone is insufficient to determine safe removal of visual tokens in multimodal large language models, because removability depends on representation depth and the surrounding deletion set. Through controlled experiments, the authors show that the same tokens can have different effects when removed at different depths or contexts. They introduce CoRePrune, a training‑free two‑stage pruning framework that refreshes deletion effects as visual representations evolve and refines candidate tokens based on the current deletion set, achieving high performance retention across multiple backbones and reducing prefill time significantly.

By Shengli He, Yongchao Liang, Roumeng He, Junjie Zeng, Jiyuan He, Xin Fang, Can Wu, Li Zheng