arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Decoder-Agnostic Token Merging for Vision Transformers: A Systematic Study of G2TM

The paper studies Graph-Guided Token Merging (G2TM), a module that reduces token count in Vision Transformers. It evaluates G2TM across multiple segmentation frameworks and decoder types, finding that its performance gains are tied to the encoder rather than the decoder. The authors report consistent reductions in GFLOPs (22‑47%) and throughput improvements (up to 74%) on ADE20K, with optimal hyperparameters depending mainly on backbone pre‑training and target dataset.

By Victor Bercy, Martyna Poreba, Michal Szczepanski, Samia Bouchafa
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 12

LapMerge: Differentiable Exact-Budget Token Merging in Linear Time

LapMerge is a new differentiable token merging operator that partitions an ordered sequence into exactly N equal‑mass segments using a learned Laplace‑kernel density, then aggregates each segment with prefix/suffix scans, achieving an exact output budget in linear time. The method preserves information while allowing end‑to‑end differentiability and can change the budget without retraining. Experiments on vision and vision‑language tasks show LapMerge matches or outperforms existing reducers and can be up to two orders of magnitude faster for long sequences, especially when token order reflects spatial or temporal locality.

By Magdalena Tr\k{e}dowicz, Aleksandra Nowak, Tomasz Steifer, {\L}ukasz Struski, Szymon P{\l}otka, Jacek Tabor