arXiv Computer Vision

Which Tokens to Merge? Diffusion Dynamics for Efficient Image Generation

The paper introduces Dynamics-aware Token Merging (DaTMe), a training‑free method that accelerates diffusion models by selectively merging tokens based on diffusion dynamics. DaTMe builds an importance map from the Tweedie denoised estimate, combining temporal changes and structural high‑frequency content to decide which tokens to preserve and which to merge. Experiments on PixArt-a and FLUX show that DaTMe maintains visual fidelity across the entire image while reducing token computation.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

AffineTok: Semantic Affine Consistency for Diffusion-Friendly Visual Tokenizer

arXiv:2608.23864v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual tokenizers increasingly inject semantic supervision into latent spaces to make downstream diffusion easier. Yet how these semantics should be or...

By Junqiu Yu, Pandeng Li, Yikai Wang, Jiaxing Zhao, Yujie Wei, Kaixun Jiang, Quanhao Li, Hongtao Yu, Zhihang Liu, Zhaohe Liao, Junjie Zhou, Yun Zheng, Yu Liu, Yanwei Fu
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Token Reduction Should Go Beyond Efficiency in Generative Models -- From Vision, Language to Multimodality

arXiv:2505. 18227v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks.

By Zhenglun Kong, Yize Li, Fanhu Zeng, Lei Xin, Shvat Messica, Xue Lin, Pu Zhao, Manolis Kellis, Hao Tang, Marinka Zitnik
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

DAVET: Denoising-Aware Visual Evidence Trajectory Allocation for Diffusion Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2608. 01821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion vision-language models (dVLMs) iteratively denoise masked responses while conditioning each denoising step on visual evidence, making visual conditioning a substantial recurring inference cost.

By Yongkang Zhou, Xiang Xia, Cheng Yan, Fan Xu, Wuyang Zhang
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
arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

Image Tokenizers Should Be Trained Between Images

The paper proposes InterpTok, a method that fine‑tunes the MAETok image tokenizer to better handle codes that lie between training samples. By training the decoder on mixtures of image codes and using a discriminator plus a mixing‑ratio loss, InterpTok preserves reconstruction quality while dramatically improving interpolation and generation metrics. The approach yields sharper, more natural image compositions and significantly lowers FID scores for diffusion models trained on the new tokenizer.

By Ole Bei{\ss}wenger, Jan-Niklas Dihlmann, Hendrik Lensch
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
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

BudgetPix: Compute-Adaptive Tokenization for Pixel-Space Image Diffusion

BudgetPix introduces a compute‑adaptive tokenization framework for pixel‑space image diffusion, dynamically allocating computational resources based on visual complexity and spatial layout. It comprises an adaptive encoder using an entropy‑guided quadtree and multi‑scale patch embedder, a scale‑aware decoder, and a flexible training schedule that allows pixel‑space denoisers to operate across variable token counts. The method integrates with existing diffusion architectures, achieving comparable fidelity to larger models while using only a fraction of the compute budget, and demonstrates improved quality‑efficiency tradeoffs in both text‑to‑image and class‑conditional generation.

By Ozgur Kara, Yujia Chen, Daniel Watson, David Forsyth, James Matthew Rehg, Wen-Sheng Chu, Du Tran
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Visual Information-Guided Parallel Decoding for Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models

Visual Information-Guided Parallel Decoding for Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models introduces the VIG‑Sampler, a method that prioritizes tokens for decoding based on their attention to image tokens and penalizes redundancy in image‑attention distributions. The approach aims to improve the quality of multimodal generation by selecting more informative tokens during diffusion decoding. Experiments on seven captioning and VQA benchmarks with three open‑source dMLLMs show that VIG‑Sampler outperforms the Info‑Gain Sampler by an average of 19.3 CIDEr points and achieves better COCO Caption results using only half as many decoding steps.

By Insu Lee, Wooje Park, Wonseok Shin, Jinwoo Son, Byonghyo Shim