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The paper introduces Gated Token Recurrence (GTR), a softmax‑free recurrent vision backbone that replaces global softmax attention with gated linear attention, alternating scan directions, and enhanced SwiGLU blocks. GTR is distilled from a DINOv3 teacher using only final‑layer patch‑token alignment, and achieves strong performance on COCO object detection (58.9 box AP) with very low latency (1.908 ms on an RTX 4090). The backbone also transfers to multiple dense prediction tasks and runs efficiently on edge hardware via a specialized CUDA operator and TensorRT deployment.
RT-DETRv4 introduces a cost‑effective distillation framework that leverages Vision Foundation Models to improve lightweight real‑time object detectors. The method uses a Deep Semantic Injector to embed high‑level VFM representations into deep detector layers and a Gradient‑guided Adaptive Modulation strategy to adjust semantic transfer intensity based on gradient norms. These techniques yield consistent performance gains across DETR‑based models without adding inference overhead, achieving state‑of‑the‑art COCO AP scores at high FPS.
arXiv:2606. 03748v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time vision demands models that are accurate, efficient, and simple to deploy across diverse hardware.
IronViT proposes a new approach to building efficient generalist vision encoders by first consolidating the knowledge of multiple specialist teachers into a softmax attention bridge and then transferring this consolidated representation to a hybrid softmax‑linear attention architecture. This two‑stage distillation process, supported by a curated data pipeline, allows the model to capture semantic, spatial, language‑aligned, and action‑relevant cues while avoiding the high‑resolution cost of traditional softmax attention. Across tasks such as recognition, retrieval, dense prediction, multimodal understanding, and robotic learning, IronViT matches or exceeds the performance of leading specialist and generalist encoders, with the hybrid encoder offering increasing efficiency at higher resolutions.
The paper introduces V-CoLA, a training‑free token compression framework tailored for vision-language models that use linear attention. V-CoLA employs a uniqueness‑aware importance criterion to select critical vision tokens and an adaptive token merging strategy to compress them, all optimized to fit the chunk‑wise parallelism of linear attention. Experiments show that V‑CoLA retains 99.5% of the original performance with only half the vision tokens and achieves significant speedups during prefill.
arXiv:2607.09086v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present Subtoken Vision Transformer (SubViT), a selective image tokenization method for fine-grained visual recognition. Standard Vision Transfo...