RAVE (Re-Allocating Visual Attention) is a lightweight pair‑gating mechanism that adds a learned query‑key bias to pre‑softmax attention scores over visual keys, derived from pre‑RoPE query and key features. It requires no architectural changes to the backbone and can be trained end‑to‑end with the rest of the model. Across multiple multimodal benchmarks, RAVE improves standard attention by an average of 3 points, especially on perception‑intensive tasks such as multilingual OCR, chart understanding, document VQA, and scene text VQA.
By Xi Leng, Xinhong Ma, Ziqiang Dong, Feng Zhang, Xiaoying Tang, Yang Yang, Guanjun Jiang
The paper introduces a training‑free visual token pruning strategy for vision‑language models that separates early vision‑guided pruning from later text‑guided reselection. By first pruning tokens with vision‑encoder attention, retaining candidates until the decoder midpoint, and then applying text‑to‑visual attention, the method preserves task‑relevant visual information. Across eight benchmarks and three models, it achieves an average performance recovery of 11.10 and 16.84 percentage points at 80% and 90% pruning, respectively, while maintaining comparable or lower LLM‑prefill latency.
arXiv:2609.37581v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding and reasoning but often incur substantial inference costs due to the large number of visu...
By Jing Wang, Zhiping Wu, Dongdong Ren, Youfang Han, Wei Zhao, Wenbin Li
arXiv:2606. 03569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but suffer from significant computational overhead during inference.
By Jiahui Wang, Kai Zhang, Mai Han, Huanghe Zhang
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but suffer from significant computational overhead during inference. While visual token pruning offers a promising solution, existing methods predominantly rely on initial attention scores.
arXiv:2607. 24017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The empirical success of attention mechanism in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often obscures its inherent, subtle flaws.
By Pengkun Jiao, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen, Yu-gang Jiang