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Mar 13

HoliTom: Holistic Token Merging for Fast Video Large Language Models

Video large language models (video LLMs) excel at video comprehension but face significant computational inefficiency due to redundant video tokens. Existing token pruning methods offer solutions. However, approaches operating within the LLM (inner-LLM pruning), such as FastV, incur intrinsic computational overhead in shallow layers. In contrast, methods performing token pruning before the LLM (outer-LLM pruning) primarily address spatial redundancy within individual frames or limited temporal windows, neglecting the crucial global temporal dynamics and correlations across longer video sequences. This leads to sub-optimal spatio-temporal reduction and does not leverage video compressibility fully. Crucially, the synergistic potential and mutual influence of combining these strategies remain unexplored. To further reduce redundancy, we introduce HoliTom, a novel training-free holistic token merging framework. HoliTom employs outer-LLM pruning through global redundancy-aware temporal segmentation, followed by spatial-temporal merging to reduce visual tokens by over 90%, significantly alleviating the LLM's computational burden. Complementing this, we introduce a robust inner-LLM token similarity-based merging approach, designed for superior performance and compatibility with outer-LLM pruning. Evaluations demonstrate our method's promising efficiency-performance trade-off on LLaVA-OneVision-7B, reducing computational costs to 6.9% of FLOPs while maintaining 99.1% of the original performance. Furthermore, we achieve a 2.28x reduction in Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) and a 1.32x acceleration in decoding throughput, highlighting the practical benefits of our integrated pruning approach for efficient video LLMs inference.

  • 6 authors
·
May 27, 2025 2

Regularized Meta-Learning for Improved Generalization

Deep ensemble methods often improve predictive performance, yet they suffer from three practical limitations: redundancy among base models that inflates computational cost and degrades conditioning, unstable weighting under multicollinearity, and overfitting in meta-learning pipelines. We propose a regularized meta-learning framework that addresses these challenges through a four-stage pipeline combining redundancy-aware projection, statistical meta-feature augmentation, and cross-validated regularized meta-models (Ridge, Lasso, and ElasticNet). Our multi-metric de-duplication strategy removes near-collinear predictors using correlation and MSE thresholds (τ_{corr}=0.95), reducing the effective condition number of the meta-design matrix while preserving predictive diversity. Engineered ensemble statistics and interaction terms recover higher-order structure unavailable to raw prediction columns. A final inverse-RMSE blending stage mitigates regularizer-selection variance. On the Playground Series S6E1 benchmark (100K samples, 72 base models), the proposed framework achieves an out-of-fold RMSE of 8.582, improving over simple averaging (8.894) and conventional Ridge stacking (8.627), while matching greedy hill climbing (8.603) with substantially lower runtime (4 times faster). Conditioning analysis shows a 53.7\% reduction in effective matrix condition number after redundancy projection. Comprehensive ablations demonstrate consistent contributions from de-duplication, statistical meta-features, and meta-ensemble blending. These results position regularized meta-learning as a stable and deployment-efficient stacking strategy for high-dimensional ensemble systems.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 12

Context-Picker: Dynamic context selection using multi-stage reinforcement learning

In long-context question answering (LCQA), determining the optimal amount of context for a given query is a significant challenge. Including too few passages may omit critical information, while including too many can introduce noise and reduce the quality of the answer. Traditional approaches, such as fixed Top-K retrieval and single-stage reranking, face the dilemma of selecting the right number of passages. This problem is particularly pronounced for factoid questions, which often require only a few specific pieces of evidence. To address this issue, we introduce Context-Picker, a reasoning-aware framework that shifts the paradigm from similarity-based ranking to minimal sufficient subset selection. Context-Picker treats context selection as a decision-making process optimized via a human-inspired, two-stage reinforcement learning schedule: a recall-oriented stage that prioritizes the coverage of reasoning chains, followed by a precision-oriented stage that aggressively prunes redundancy to distill a compact evidence set. To resolve reward sparsity, we propose an offline evidence distillation pipeline that mines "minimal sufficient sets" via a Leave-One-Out (LOO) procedure, providing dense, task-aligned supervision. Experiments on five long-context and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that Context-Picker significantly outperforms strong RAG baselines, achieving superior answer accuracy with comparable or reduced context lengths. Ablation studies indicate that the coarse-to-fine optimization schedule, the redundancy-aware reward shaping, and the rationale-guided format all contribute substantially to these gains.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 16, 2025

DUET-VLM: Dual stage Unified Efficient Token reduction for VLM Training and Inference

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable multimodal understanding and reasoning capabilities, yet remain computationally expensive due to dense visual tokenization. Existing efficiency approaches either merge redundant visual tokens or drop them progressively in language backbone, often trading accuracy for speed. In this work, we propose DUET-VLM, a versatile plug-and-play dual compression framework that consists of (a) vision-only redundancy aware compression of vision encoder's output into information-preserving tokens, followed by (b) layer-wise, salient text-guided dropping of visual tokens within the language backbone to progressively prune less informative tokens. This coordinated token management enables aggressive compression while retaining critical semantics. On LLaVA-1.5-7B, our approach maintains over 99% of baseline accuracy with 67% fewer tokens, and still retains >97% even at 89% reduction. With this dual-stage compression during training, it achieves 99.7% accuracy at 67% and 97.6% at 89%, surpassing prior SoTA visual token reduction methods across multiple benchmarks. When integrated into Video-LLaVA-7B, it even surpasses the baseline -- achieving >100% accuracy with a substantial 53.1% token reduction and retaining 97.6% accuracy under an extreme 93.4% setting. These results highlight end-to-end training with DUET-VLM, enabling robust adaptation to reduced visual (image/video) input without sacrificing accuracy, producing compact yet semantically rich representations within the same computational budget. Our code is available at https://github.com/AMD-AGI/DUET-VLM.

amd AMD
·
Feb 21 2

FreBIS: Frequency-Based Stratification for Neural Implicit Surface Representations

Neural implicit surface representation techniques are in high demand for advancing technologies in augmented reality/virtual reality, digital twins, autonomous navigation, and many other fields. With their ability to model object surfaces in a scene as a continuous function, such techniques have made remarkable strides recently, especially over classical 3D surface reconstruction methods, such as those that use voxels or point clouds. However, these methods struggle with scenes that have varied and complex surfaces principally because they model any given scene with a single encoder network that is tasked to capture all of low through high-surface frequency information in the scene simultaneously. In this work, we propose a novel, neural implicit surface representation approach called FreBIS to overcome this challenge. FreBIS works by stratifying the scene based on the frequency of surfaces into multiple frequency levels, with each level (or a group of levels) encoded by a dedicated encoder. Moreover, FreBIS encourages these encoders to capture complementary information by promoting mutual dissimilarity of the encoded features via a novel, redundancy-aware weighting module. Empirical evaluations on the challenging BlendedMVS dataset indicate that replacing the standard encoder in an off-the-shelf neural surface reconstruction method with our frequency-stratified encoders yields significant improvements. These enhancements are evident both in the quality of the reconstructed 3D surfaces and in the fidelity of their renderings from any viewpoint.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 28, 2025

Beyond Redundancy: Information-aware Unsupervised Multiplex Graph Structure Learning

Unsupervised Multiplex Graph Learning (UMGL) aims to learn node representations on various edge types without manual labeling. However, existing research overlooks a key factor: the reliability of the graph structure. Real-world data often exhibit a complex nature and contain abundant task-irrelevant noise, severely compromising UMGL's performance. Moreover, existing methods primarily rely on contrastive learning to maximize mutual information across different graphs, limiting them to multiplex graph redundant scenarios and failing to capture view-unique task-relevant information. In this paper, we focus on a more realistic and challenging task: to unsupervisedly learn a fused graph from multiple graphs that preserve sufficient task-relevant information while removing task-irrelevant noise. Specifically, our proposed Information-aware Unsupervised Multiplex Graph Fusion framework (InfoMGF) uses graph structure refinement to eliminate irrelevant noise and simultaneously maximizes view-shared and view-unique task-relevant information, thereby tackling the frontier of non-redundant multiplex graph. Theoretical analyses further guarantee the effectiveness of InfoMGF. Comprehensive experiments against various baselines on different downstream tasks demonstrate its superior performance and robustness. Surprisingly, our unsupervised method even beats the sophisticated supervised approaches. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/zxlearningdeep/InfoMGF.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 25, 2024

IA-RED$^2$: Interpretability-Aware Redundancy Reduction for Vision Transformers

The self-attention-based model, transformer, is recently becoming the leading backbone in the field of computer vision. In spite of the impressive success made by transformers in a variety of vision tasks, it still suffers from heavy computation and intensive memory costs. To address this limitation, this paper presents an Interpretability-Aware REDundancy REDuction framework (IA-RED^2). We start by observing a large amount of redundant computation, mainly spent on uncorrelated input patches, and then introduce an interpretable module to dynamically and gracefully drop these redundant patches. This novel framework is then extended to a hierarchical structure, where uncorrelated tokens at different stages are gradually removed, resulting in a considerable shrinkage of computational cost. We include extensive experiments on both image and video tasks, where our method could deliver up to 1.4x speed-up for state-of-the-art models like DeiT and TimeSformer, by only sacrificing less than 0.7% accuracy. More importantly, contrary to other acceleration approaches, our method is inherently interpretable with substantial visual evidence, making vision transformer closer to a more human-understandable architecture while being lighter. We demonstrate that the interpretability that naturally emerged in our framework can outperform the raw attention learned by the original visual transformer, as well as those generated by off-the-shelf interpretation methods, with both qualitative and quantitative results. Project Page: http://people.csail.mit.edu/bpan/ia-red/.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 23, 2021

Community-Aware Social Community Recommendation

Social recommendation, which seeks to leverage social ties among users to alleviate the sparsity issue of user-item interactions, has emerged as a popular technique for elevating personalized services in recommender systems. Despite being effective, existing social recommendation models are mainly devised for recommending regular items such as blogs, images, and products, and largely fail for community recommendations due to overlooking the unique characteristics of communities. Distinctly, communities are constituted by individuals, who present high dynamicity and relate to rich structural patterns in social networks. To our knowledge, limited research has been devoted to comprehensively exploiting this information for recommending communities. To bridge this gap, this paper presents CASO, a novel and effective model specially designed for social community recommendation. Under the hood, CASO harnesses three carefully-crafted encoders for user embedding, wherein two of them extract community-related global and local structures from the social network via social modularity maximization and social closeness aggregation, while the third one captures user preferences using collaborative filtering with observed user-community affiliations. To further eliminate feature redundancy therein, we introduce a mutual exclusion between social and collaborative signals. Finally, CASO includes a community detection loss in the model optimization, thereby producing community-aware embeddings for communities. Our extensive experiments evaluating CASO against nine strong baselines on six real-world social networks demonstrate its consistent and remarkable superiority over the state of the art in terms of community recommendation performance.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 7, 2025

CATANet: Efficient Content-Aware Token Aggregation for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution

Transformer-based methods have demonstrated impressive performance in low-level visual tasks such as Image Super-Resolution (SR). However, its computational complexity grows quadratically with the spatial resolution. A series of works attempt to alleviate this problem by dividing Low-Resolution images into local windows, axial stripes, or dilated windows. SR typically leverages the redundancy of images for reconstruction, and this redundancy appears not only in local regions but also in long-range regions. However, these methods limit attention computation to content-agnostic local regions, limiting directly the ability of attention to capture long-range dependency. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight Content-Aware Token Aggregation Network (CATANet). Specifically, we propose an efficient Content-Aware Token Aggregation module for aggregating long-range content-similar tokens, which shares token centers across all image tokens and updates them only during the training phase. Then we utilize intra-group self-attention to enable long-range information interaction. Moreover, we design an inter-group cross-attention to further enhance global information interaction. The experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art cluster-based method SPIN, our method achieves superior performance, with a maximum PSNR improvement of 0.33dB and nearly double the inference speed.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025 1

Contribution-aware Token Compression for Efficient Video Understanding via Reinforcement Learning

Video large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in video understanding tasks. However, the redundancy of video tokens introduces significant computational overhead during inference, limiting their practical deployment. Many compression algorithms are proposed to prioritize retaining features with the highest attention scores to minimize perturbations in attention computations. However, the correlation between attention scores and their actual contribution to correct answers remains ambiguous. To address the above limitation, we propose a novel Contribution-aware token Compression algorithm for VIDeo understanding (CaCoVID) that explicitly optimizes the token selection policy based on the contribution of tokens to correct predictions. First, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based framework that optimizes a policy network to select video token combinations with the greatest contribution to correct predictions. This paradigm shifts the focus from passive token preservation to active discovery of optimal compressed token combinations. Secondly, we propose a combinatorial policy optimization algorithm with online combination space sampling, which dramatically reduces the exploration space for video token combinations and accelerates the convergence speed of policy optimization. Extensive experiments on diverse video understanding benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CaCoVID. Codes will be released.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 2

Uncertainty-Aware Subset Selection for Robust Visual Explainability under Distribution Shifts

Subset selection-based methods are widely used to explain deep vision models: they attribute predictions by highlighting the most influential image regions and support object-level explanations. While these methods perform well in in-distribution (ID) settings, their behavior under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions remains poorly understood. Through extensive experiments across multiple ID-OOD sets, we find that reliability of the existing subset based methods degrades markedly, yielding redundant, unstable, and uncertainty-sensitive explanations. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a framework that combines submodular subset selection with layer-wise, gradient-based uncertainty estimation to improve robustness and fidelity without requiring additional training or auxiliary models. Our approach estimates uncertainty via adaptive weight perturbations and uses these estimates to guide submodular optimization, ensuring diverse and informative subset selection. Empirical evaluations show that, beyond mitigating the weaknesses of existing methods under OOD scenarios, our framework also yields improvements in ID settings. These findings highlight limitations of current subset-based approaches and demonstrate how uncertainty-driven optimization can enhance attribution and object-level interpretability, paving the way for more transparent and trustworthy AI in real-world vision applications.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 9, 2025

FLASH: Latent-Aware Semi-Autoregressive Speculative Decoding for Multimodal Tasks

Large language and multimodal models (LLMs and LMMs) exhibit strong inference capabilities but are often limited by slow decoding speeds. This challenge is especially acute in LMMs, where visual inputs typically comprise more tokens with lower information density than text -- an issue exacerbated by recent trends toward finer-grained visual tokenizations to boost performance. Speculative decoding has been effective in accelerating LLM inference by using a smaller draft model to generate candidate tokens, which are then selectively verified by the target model, improving speed without sacrificing output quality. While this strategy has been extended to LMMs, existing methods largely overlook the unique properties of visual inputs and depend solely on text-based draft models. In this work, we propose FLASH (Fast Latent-Aware Semi-Autoregressive Heuristics), a speculative decoding framework designed specifically for LMMs, which leverages two key properties of multimodal data to design the draft model. First, to address redundancy in visual tokens, we propose a lightweight latent-aware token compression mechanism. Second, recognizing that visual objects often co-occur within a scene, we employ a semi-autoregressive decoding strategy to generate multiple tokens per forward pass. These innovations accelerate draft decoding while maintaining high acceptance rates, resulting in faster overall inference. Experiments show that FLASH significantly outperforms prior speculative decoding approaches in both unimodal and multimodal settings, achieving up to 2.68times speed-up on video captioning and 2.55times on visual instruction tuning tasks compared to the original LMM. Our code is available https://github.com/ZihuaEvan/FlashSD/{[here]}.

  • 6 authors
·
May 19, 2025

Aware First, Think Less: Dynamic Boundary Self-Awareness Drives Extreme Reasoning Efficiency in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their capabilities on complex reasoning tasks through Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, this approach often results in substantial redundancy, impairing computational efficiency and causing significant delays in real-time applications. To improve the efficiency, current methods often rely on human-defined difficulty priors, which do not align with the LLM's self-awared difficulty, leading to inefficiencies. In this paper, we introduce the Dynamic Reasoning-Boundary Self-Awareness Framework (DR. SAF), which enables models to dynamically assess and adjust their reasoning depth in response to problem complexity. DR. SAF integrates three key components: Boundary Self-Awareness Alignment, Adaptive Reward Management, and a Boundary Preservation Mechanism. These components allow models to optimize their reasoning processes, balancing efficiency and accuracy without compromising performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that DR. SAF achieves a 49.27% reduction in total response tokens with minimal loss in accuracy. The framework also delivers a 6.59x gain in token efficiency and a 5x reduction in training time, making it well-suited to resource-limited settings. During extreme training, DR. SAF can even surpass traditional instruction-based models in token efficiency with more than 16% accuracy improvement.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 15, 2025

RegionE: Adaptive Region-Aware Generation for Efficient Image Editing

Recently, instruction-based image editing (IIE) has received widespread attention. In practice, IIE often modifies only specific regions of an image, while the remaining areas largely remain unchanged. Although these two types of regions differ significantly in generation difficulty and computational redundancy, existing IIE models do not account for this distinction, instead applying a uniform generation process across the entire image. This motivates us to propose RegionE, an adaptive, region-aware generation framework that accelerates IIE tasks without additional training. Specifically, the RegionE framework consists of three main components: 1) Adaptive Region Partition. We observed that the trajectory of unedited regions is straight, allowing for multi-step denoised predictions to be inferred in a single step. Therefore, in the early denoising stages, we partition the image into edited and unedited regions based on the difference between the final estimated result and the reference image. 2) Region-Aware Generation. After distinguishing the regions, we replace multi-step denoising with one-step prediction for unedited areas. For edited regions, the trajectory is curved, requiring local iterative denoising. To improve the efficiency and quality of local iterative generation, we propose the Region-Instruction KV Cache, which reduces computational cost while incorporating global information. 3) Adaptive Velocity Decay Cache. Observing that adjacent timesteps in edited regions exhibit strong velocity similarity, we further propose an adaptive velocity decay cache to accelerate the local denoising process. We applied RegionE to state-of-the-art IIE base models, including Step1X-Edit, FLUX.1 Kontext, and Qwen-Image-Edit. RegionE achieved acceleration factors of 2.57, 2.41, and 2.06. Evaluations by GPT-4o confirmed that semantic and perceptual fidelity were well preserved.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 29, 2025 1

A-SDM: Accelerating Stable Diffusion through Redundancy Removal and Performance Optimization

The Stable Diffusion Model (SDM) is a popular and efficient text-to-image (t2i) generation and image-to-image (i2i) generation model. Although there have been some attempts to reduce sampling steps, model distillation, and network quantization, these previous methods generally retain the original network architecture. Billion scale parameters and high computing requirements make the research of model architecture adjustment scarce. In this work, we first explore the computational redundancy part of the network, and then prune the redundancy blocks of the model and maintain the network performance through a progressive incubation strategy. Secondly, in order to maintaining the model performance, we add cross-layer multi-expert conditional convolution (CLME-Condconv) to the block pruning part to inherit the original convolution parameters. Thirdly, we propose a global-regional interactive (GRI) attention to speed up the computationally intensive attention part. Finally, we use semantic-aware supervision (SAS) to align the outputs of the teacher model and student model at the semantic level. Experiments show that this method can effectively train a lightweight model close to the performance of the original SD model, and effectively improve the model speed under limited resources. Experiments show that the proposed method can effectively train a light-weight model close to the performance of the original SD model, and effectively improve the model speed under limited resources. After acceleration, the UNet part of the model is 22% faster and the overall speed is 19% faster.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 24, 2023

Causality-Aware Temporal Projection for Video Understanding in Video-LLMs

Recent Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have shown strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet remain challenged by video understanding tasks that require consistent temporal ordering and causal coherence. Many parameter-efficient Video-LLMs rely on unconstrained bidirectional projectors to model inter-frame interactions, which can blur temporal ordering by allowing later frames to influence earlier representations, without explicit architectural mechanisms to respect the directional nature of video reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose V-CORE, a parameter-efficient framework that introduces explicit temporal ordering constraints for video understanding. V-CORE consists of two key components: (1) Learnable Spatial Aggregation (LSA), which adaptively selects salient spatial tokens to reduce redundancy, and (2) a Causality-Aware Temporal Projector (CATP), which enforces structured unidirectional information flow via block-causal attention and a terminal dynamic summary token acting as a causal sink. This design preserves intra-frame spatial interactions while ensuring that temporal information is aggregated in a strictly ordered manner. With 4-bit QLoRA and a frozen LLM backbone, V-CORE can be trained efficiently on a single consumer GPU. Experiments show that V-CORE achieves strong performance on the challenging NExT-QA benchmark, reaching 61.2% accuracy, and remains competitive across MSVD-QA, MSRVTT-QA, and TGIF-QA, with gains concentrated in temporal and causal reasoning subcategories (+3.5% and +5.2% respectively), directly validating the importance of explicit temporal ordering constraints.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 5

ToDRE: Visual Token Pruning via Diversity and Task Awareness for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models

The representation of visual inputs of large vision-language models (LVLMs) usually involves substantially more tokens than that of textual inputs, leading to significant computational overhead. Several recent studies strive to mitigate this issue by either conducting token compression to prune redundant visual tokens or guiding them to bypass certain computational stages. While most existing work exploits token importance as the redundancy indicator, our study reveals that two largely neglected factors, namely, the diversity of retained visual tokens and their task relevance, often offer more robust criteria in token pruning. To this end, we design ToDRE, a two-stage and training-free token compression framework that achieves superior performance by pruning Tokens based on token Diversity and token-task RElevance. Instead of pruning redundant tokens, ToDRE introduces a greedy k-center algorithm to select and retain a small subset of diverse visual tokens after the vision encoder. Additionally, ToDRE addresses the "information migration" by further eliminating task-irrelevant visual tokens within the decoder of large language model (LLM). Extensive experiments show that ToDRE effectively reduces 90% of visual tokens after vision encoder and adaptively prunes all visual tokens within certain LLM's decoder layers, leading to a 2.6x speed-up in total inference time while maintaining 95.1% of model performance and excellent compatibility with efficient attention operators.

  • 3 authors
·
May 24, 2025

DAPFAM: A Domain-Aware Family-level Dataset to benchmark cross domain patent retrieval

Patent prior-art retrieval becomes especially challenging when relevant disclosures cross technological boundaries. Existing benchmarks lack explicit domain partitions, making it difficult to assess how retrieval systems cope with such shifts. We introduce DAPFAM, a family-level benchmark with explicit IN-domain and OUT-domain partitions defined by a new IPC3 overlap scheme. The dataset contains 1,247 query families and 45,336 target families aggregated at the family level to reduce international redundancy, with citation based relevance judgments. We conduct 249 controlled experiments spanning lexical (BM25) and dense (transformer) backends, document and passage level retrieval, multiple query and document representations, aggregation strategies, and hybrid fusion via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). Results reveal a pronounced domain gap: OUT-domain performance remains roughly five times lower than IN-domain across all configurations. Passage-level retrieval consistently outperforms document-level, and dense methods provide modest gains over BM25, but none close the OUT-domain gap. Document-level RRF yields strong effectiveness efficiency trade-offs with minimal overhead. By exposing the persistent challenge of cross-domain retrieval, DAPFAM provides a reproducible, compute-aware testbed for developing more robust patent IR systems. The dataset is publicly available on huggingface at https://huggingface.co/datasets/datalyes/DAPFAM_patent.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 27, 2025

PAT: Pruning-Aware Tuning for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel in language tasks, especially with supervised fine-tuning after pre-training. However, their substantial memory and computational requirements hinder practical applications. Structural pruning, which reduces less significant weight dimensions, is one solution. Yet, traditional post-hoc pruning often leads to significant performance loss, with limited recovery from further fine-tuning due to reduced capacity. Since the model fine-tuning refines the general and chaotic knowledge in pre-trained models, we aim to incorporate structural pruning with the fine-tuning, and propose the Pruning-Aware Tuning (PAT) paradigm to eliminate model redundancy while preserving the model performance to the maximum extend. Specifically, we insert the innovative Hybrid Sparsification Modules (HSMs) between the Attention and FFN components to accordingly sparsify the upstream and downstream linear modules. The HSM comprises a lightweight operator and a globally shared trainable mask. The lightweight operator maintains a training overhead comparable to that of LoRA, while the trainable mask unifies the channels to be sparsified, ensuring structural pruning. Additionally, we propose the Identity Loss which decouples the transformation and scaling properties of the HSMs to enhance training robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAT excels in both performance and efficiency. For example, our Llama2-7b model with a 25\% pruning ratio achieves 1.33times speedup while outperforming the LoRA-finetuned model by up to 1.26\% in accuracy with a similar training cost. Code: https://github.com/kriskrisliu/PAT_Pruning-Aware-Tuning

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 26, 2024

FlowCut: Rethinking Redundancy via Information Flow for Efficient Vision-Language Models

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) excel at multimodal understanding but suffer from high computational costs due to redundant vision tokens. Existing pruning methods typically rely on single-layer attention scores to rank and prune redundant visual tokens to solve this inefficiency. However, as the interaction between tokens and layers is complicated, this raises a basic question: Is such a simple single-layer criterion sufficient to identify redundancy? To answer this question, we rethink the emergence of redundant visual tokens from a fundamental perspective: information flow, which models the interaction between tokens and layers by capturing how information moves between tokens across layers. We find (1) the CLS token acts as an information relay, which can simplify the complicated flow analysis; (2) the redundancy emerges progressively and dynamically via layer-wise attention concentration; and (3) relying solely on attention scores from single layers can lead to contradictory redundancy identification. Based on this, we propose FlowCut, an information-flow-aware pruning framework, mitigating the insufficiency of the current criterion for identifying redundant tokens and better aligning with the model's inherent behaviors. Extensive experiments show that FlowCut achieves superior results, outperforming SoTA by 1.6% on LLaVA-1.5-7B with 88.9% token reduction, and by 4.3% on LLaVA-NeXT-7B with 94.4% reduction, delivering 3.2x speed-up in the prefilling stage. Our code is available at https://github.com/TungChintao/FlowCut

  • 8 authors
·
May 26, 2025

Core Context Aware Attention for Long Context Language Modeling

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks primarily attributed to self-attention mechanism, which requires a token to consider all preceding tokens as its context to compute the attention score. However, when the context length L becomes very large (e.g., 32K), more redundant context information will be included w.r.t. any tokens, making the self-attention suffer from two main limitations: 1) The computational and memory complexity scales quadratically w.r.t. L; 2) The presence of redundant context information may hamper the model to capture dependencies among crucial tokens, which may degrade the representation performance. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play Core Context Aware (CCA) Attention for efficient long-range context modeling, which consists of two components: 1) Globality-pooling attention that divides input tokens into groups and then dynamically merges tokens within each group into one core token based on their significance; 2) Locality-preserved attention that incorporates neighboring tokens into the attention calculation. The two complementary attentions will then be fused to the final attention, maintaining comprehensive modeling ability as the full self-attention. In this way, the core context information w.r.t. a given token will be automatically focused and strengthened, while the context information in redundant groups will be diminished during the learning process. As a result, the computational and memory complexity will be significantly reduced. More importantly, the CCA-Attention can improve the long-context modeling ability by diminishing the redundant context information. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our CCA-Attention significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of computational efficiency and long-context modeling ability.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024

Decoding with Structured Awareness: Integrating Directional, Frequency-Spatial, and Structural Attention for Medical Image Segmentation

To address the limitations of Transformer decoders in capturing edge details, recognizing local textures and modeling spatial continuity, this paper proposes a novel decoder framework specifically designed for medical image segmentation, comprising three core modules. First, the Adaptive Cross-Fusion Attention (ACFA) module integrates channel feature enhancement with spatial attention mechanisms and introduces learnable guidance in three directions (planar, horizontal, and vertical) to enhance responsiveness to key regions and structural orientations. Second, the Triple Feature Fusion Attention (TFFA) module fuses features from Spatial, Fourier and Wavelet domains, achieving joint frequency-spatial representation that strengthens global dependency and structural modeling while preserving local information such as edges and textures, making it particularly effective in complex and blurred boundary scenarios. Finally, the Structural-aware Multi-scale Masking Module (SMMM) optimizes the skip connections between encoder and decoder by leveraging multi-scale context and structural saliency filtering, effectively reducing feature redundancy and improving semantic interaction quality. Working synergistically, these modules not only address the shortcomings of traditional decoders but also significantly enhance performance in high-precision tasks such as tumor segmentation and organ boundary extraction, improving both segmentation accuracy and model generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that this framework provides an efficient and practical solution for medical image segmentation.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 5, 2025

Reconsidering Overthinking: Penalizing Internal and External Redundancy in CoT Reasoning

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often produce excessively verbose reasoning traces, a phenomenon known as overthinking, which hampers both efficiency and interpretability. Prior works primarily address this issue by reducing response length, without fully examining the underlying semantic structure of the reasoning process. In this paper, we revisit overthinking by decomposing it into two distinct forms: internal redundancy, which consists of low-contribution reasoning steps within the first correct solution (FCS), and external redundancy, which refers to unnecessary continuation after the FCS. To mitigate both forms, we propose a dual-penalty reinforcement learning framework. For internal redundancy, we adopt a sliding-window semantic analysis to penalize low-gain reasoning steps that contribute little toward reaching the correct answer. For external redundancy, we penalize its proportion beyond the FCS to encourage earlier termination. Our method significantly compresses reasoning traces with minimal accuracy loss, and generalizes effectively to out-of-domain tasks such as question answering and code generation. Crucially, we find that external redundancy can be safely removed without degrading performance, whereas internal redundancy must be reduced more cautiously to avoid impairing correctness. These findings suggest that our method not only improves reasoning efficiency but also enables implicit, semantic-aware control over Chain-of-Thought length, paving the way for more concise and interpretable LRMs.

  • 12 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025 2

Beyond Degradation Redundancy: Contrastive Prompt Learning for All-in-One Image Restoration

All-in-One Image Restoration (AiOIR), which addresses diverse degradation types with a unified model, presents significant challenges in designing task-aware prompts that effectively guide restoration across multiple degradation scenarios. While adaptive prompt learning enables end-to-end optimization, it often yields overlapping or redundant task representations. Conversely, explicit prompts derived from pretrained classifiers enhance discriminability but discard critical visual information needed for reconstruction. To address these limitations, we introduce Contrastive Prompt Learning (CPL), a framework that aims to improve prompt-task alignment through two complementary components: a Sparse Prompt Module (SPM) that efficiently captures degradation-aware representations while reducing redundancy, and a Contrastive Prompt Regularization (CPR) that explicitly strengthens task boundaries by incorporating negative prompt samples across different degradation types. Unlike previous approaches that focus primarily on degradation classification, CPL directly optimizes the interaction between prompts and the restoration model. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks show that CPL consistently boosts the performance of strong AiOIR baselines across diverse scenarios. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art average performance on these benchmarks, providing a general and robust solution for AiOIR. The code is available at https://github.com/Aitical/CPLIR

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025

GUI-KV: Efficient GUI Agents via KV Cache with Spatio-Temporal Awareness

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents built on vision-language models have emerged as a promising approach to automate human-computer workflows. However, they also face the inefficiency challenge as they process long sequences of high-resolution screenshots and solving long-horizon tasks, making inference slow, costly and memory-bound. While key-value (KV) caching can mitigate this, storing the full cache is prohibitive for image-heavy contexts. Existing cache-compression methods are sub-optimal as they do not account for the spatial and temporal redundancy of GUIs. In this work, we first analyze attention patterns in GUI agent workloads and find that, unlike in natural images, attention sparsity is uniformly high across all transformer layers. This insight motivates a simple uniform budget allocation strategy, which we show empirically outperforms more complex layer-varying schemes. Building on this, we introduce GUI-KV, a plug-and-play KV cache compression method for GUI agents that requires no retraining. GUI-KV combines two novel techniques: (i) spatial saliency guidance, which augments attention scores with the L2 norm of hidden states to better preserve semantically important visual tokens, and (ii) temporal redundancy scoring, which projects previous frames' keys onto the current frame's key subspace to preferentially prune redundant history. Across standard GUI agent benchmarks and models, GUI-KV outperforms competitive KV compression baselines, closely matching full-cache accuracy at modest budgets. Notably, in a 5-screenshot setting on the AgentNetBench benchmark, GUI-KV reduces decoding FLOPs by 38.9% while increasing step accuracy by 4.1% over the full-cache baseline. These results demonstrate that exploiting GUI-specific redundancies enables efficient and reliable agent performance.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025 2

Whole-body Motion Control of an Omnidirectional Wheel-Legged Mobile Manipulator via Contact-Aware Dynamic Optimization

Wheel-legged robots with integrated manipulators hold great promise for mobile manipulation in logistics, industrial automation, and human-robot collaboration. However, unified control of such systems remains challenging due to the redundancy in degrees of freedom, complex wheel-ground contact dynamics, and the need for seamless coordination between locomotion and manipulation. In this work, we present the design and whole-body motion control of an omnidirectional wheel-legged quadrupedal robot equipped with a dexterous manipulator. The proposed platform incorporates independently actuated steering modules and hub-driven wheels, enabling agile omnidirectional locomotion with high maneuverability in structured environments. To address the challenges of contact-rich interaction, we develop a contact-aware whole-body dynamic optimization framework that integrates point-contact modeling for manipulation with line-contact modeling for wheel-ground interactions. A warm-start strategy is introduced to accelerate online optimization, ensuring real-time feasibility for high-dimensional control. Furthermore, a unified kinematic model tailored for the robot's 4WIS-4WID actuation scheme eliminates the need for mode switching across different locomotion strategies, improving control consistency and robustness. Simulation and experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, demonstrating agile terrain traversal, high-speed omnidirectional mobility, and precise manipulation under diverse scenarios, underscoring the system's potential for factory automation, urban logistics, and service robotics in semi-structured environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025

D3: Diversity, Difficulty, and Dependability-Aware Data Selection for Sample-Efficient LLM Instruction Tuning

Recent advancements in instruction tuning for large language models (LLMs) suggest that a small, high-quality dataset can significantly equip LLMs with instruction-following capabilities, outperforming large datasets often burdened by quality and redundancy issues. However, the challenge lies in automatically identifying valuable subsets from large datasets to boost both the effectiveness and efficiency of instruction tuning. In this paper, we first establish data selection criteria based on three distinct aspects of data value: diversity, difficulty, and dependability, and then propose the D3 method comprising two key steps of scoring and selection. Specifically, in the scoring step, we define the diversity function to measure sample distinctiveness and introduce the uncertainty-based prediction difficulty to evaluate sample difficulty by mitigating the interference of context-oriented generation diversity. Additionally, we integrate an external LLM for dependability assessment. In the selection step, we formulate the D3 weighted coreset objective, which jointly optimizes three aspects of data value to solve for the most valuable subset. The two steps of D3 can iterate multiple rounds, incorporating feedback to refine the selection focus adaptively. Experiments on both public datasets and the real-world Taobao Live application demonstrate the effectiveness of D3 in endowing LLMs with competitive or even superior instruction-following capabilities using less than 10\% of the entire dataset.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 14, 2025

VideoEspresso: A Large-Scale Chain-of-Thought Dataset for Fine-Grained Video Reasoning via Core Frame Selection

The advancement of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) has significantly improved multimodal understanding, yet challenges remain in video reasoning tasks due to the scarcity of high-quality, large-scale datasets. Existing video question-answering (VideoQA) datasets often rely on costly manual annotations with insufficient granularity or automatic construction methods with redundant frame-by-frame analysis, limiting their scalability and effectiveness for complex reasoning. To address these challenges, we introduce VideoEspresso, a novel dataset that features VideoQA pairs preserving essential spatial details and temporal coherence, along with multimodal annotations of intermediate reasoning steps. Our construction pipeline employs a semantic-aware method to reduce redundancy, followed by generating QA pairs using GPT-4o. We further develop video Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations to enrich reasoning processes, guiding GPT-4o in extracting logical relationships from QA pairs and video content. To exploit the potential of high-quality VideoQA pairs, we propose a Hybrid LVLMs Collaboration framework, featuring a Frame Selector and a two-stage instruction fine-tuned reasoning LVLM. This framework adaptively selects core frames and performs CoT reasoning using multimodal evidence. Evaluated on our proposed benchmark with 14 tasks against 9 popular LVLMs, our method outperforms existing baselines on most tasks, demonstrating superior video reasoning capabilities. Our code and dataset will be released at: https://github.com/hshjerry/VideoEspresso

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024 3

Think How to Think: Mitigating Overthinking with Autonomous Difficulty Cognition in Large Reasoning Models

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks but often suffer from overthinking, generating overly long and redundant reasoning trajectories. To explore its essence, our empirical analysis reveals that LRMs are primarily limited to recognizing task properties (i.e., difficulty levels) like humans before solving the problem, leading to a one-size-fits-all reasoning process. Inspired by this, a pressing and natural question emerges: Can we explicitly bootstrap such ability to alleviate overthinking in LRMs? In this paper, we propose Think-How-to-Think (TH2T), a novel two-stage fine-tuning strategy that progressively inspires LRMs' difficulty cognition and redundancy cognition of LRMs. Specifically, we first inject difficulty hypnosis into output prefixes to guide the model toward adaptive reasoning depth, trained on a hybrid dataset mixing short and long reasoning paths. Then, we incorporate redundancy hypnosis, which supervises the intermediate reasoning steps to identify and eliminate unnecessary reasoning patterns. Experiments on 7B/14B/32B models demonstrate that TH2T significantly reduces inference costs by over 70% on easy tasks and 40% on hard tasks while maintaining performance stability. The resulting outputs exhibit clear signs of difficulty-aware capabilities and reduced redundancy (e.g., reflection and looping).

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 3, 2025

Hybrid Convolution and Frequency State Space Network for Image Compression

Learned image compression (LIC) has recently benefited from Transformer based and state space model (SSM) based architectures. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) effectively capture local high frequency details, whereas Transformers and SSMs provide strong long range modeling capabilities but may cause structural information loss or ignore frequency characteristics that are crucial for compression. In this work we propose HCFSSNet, a Hybrid Convolution and Frequency State Space Network for LIC. HCFSSNet uses CNNs to extract local high frequency structures and introduces a Vision Frequency State Space (VFSS) block that models long range low frequency information. The VFSS block combines an Omni directional Neighborhood State Space (VONSS) module, which scans features horizontally, vertically and diagonally, with an Adaptive Frequency Modulation Module (AFMM) that applies content adaptive weighting of discrete cosine transform frequency components for more efficient bit allocation. To further reduce redundancy in the entropy model, we integrate AFMM with a Swin Transformer to form a Frequency Swin Transformer Attention Module (FSTAM) for frequency aware side information modeling. Experiments on the Kodak, Tecnick and CLIC Professional Validation datasets show that HCFSSNet achieves competitive rate distortion performance compared with recent SSM based codecs such as MambaIC, while using significantly fewer parameters. On Kodak, Tecnick and CLIC, HCFSSNet reduces BD rate over the VTM anchor by 18.06, 24.56 and 22.44 percent, respectively, providing an efficient and interpretable hybrid architecture for future learned image compression systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025

Lite Pose: Efficient Architecture Design for 2D Human Pose Estimation

Pose estimation plays a critical role in human-centered vision applications. However, it is difficult to deploy state-of-the-art HRNet-based pose estimation models on resource-constrained edge devices due to the high computational cost (more than 150 GMACs per frame). In this paper, we study efficient architecture design for real-time multi-person pose estimation on edge. We reveal that HRNet's high-resolution branches are redundant for models at the low-computation region via our gradual shrinking experiments. Removing them improves both efficiency and performance. Inspired by this finding, we design LitePose, an efficient single-branch architecture for pose estimation, and introduce two simple approaches to enhance the capacity of LitePose, including Fusion Deconv Head and Large Kernel Convs. Fusion Deconv Head removes the redundancy in high-resolution branches, allowing scale-aware feature fusion with low overhead. Large Kernel Convs significantly improve the model's capacity and receptive field while maintaining a low computational cost. With only 25% computation increment, 7x7 kernels achieve +14.0 mAP better than 3x3 kernels on the CrowdPose dataset. On mobile platforms, LitePose reduces the latency by up to 5.0x without sacrificing performance, compared with prior state-of-the-art efficient pose estimation models, pushing the frontier of real-time multi-person pose estimation on edge. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/litepose.

  • 5 authors
·
May 2, 2022

SAIL: SRAM-Accelerated LLM Inference System with Lookup-Table-based GEMV

Large Language Model (LLM) inference requires substantial computational resources, yet CPU-based inference remains essential for democratizing AI due to the widespread availability of CPUs compared to specialized accelerators. However, efficient LLM inference on CPUs faces two fundamental challenges: (1) existing CPU architectures struggle with low-precision arithmetic required by quantized models, where optimal bit precision varies across models and layers; and (2) the memory-bound nature of the token generation phase creates severe performance bottlenecks. To address these challenges, we propose SAIL (SRAM-Accelerated Inference of LLMs), a CPU-based inference solution that efficiently supports arbitrary bit precisions with minimal overhead. SAIL integrates three key innovations: First, we introduce Batched LUT-based General Matrix-Vector Multiplication (LUT-GEMV) with SRAM-based processing-in-memory, enabling high data reuse through lookup tables and reducing memory movement. Second, our Pattern-Aware LUT optimization identifies and exploits redundancy in input activation patterns, reducing computation cycles by 13.8\%. Third, we develop an in-memory type conversion algorithm that leverages PIM's parallelism for efficient de-/quantization operations, alleviating pressure on CPU's vector units. Our architecture requires only 2\% hardware overhead and a single new instruction, while maintaining dual functionality as both compute and storage units. Experimental evaluations using a modified gem5 simulator demonstrate that SAIL achieves up to 10.7x speedup and 19.9x higher tokens per dollar compared to ARM Neoverse-N1 CPU baselines, and up to 7.04x better cost efficiency than NVIDIA V100 GPUs, establishing a practical path for efficient CPU-based LLM inference.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 30, 2025

Read-ME: Refactorizing LLMs as Router-Decoupled Mixture of Experts with System Co-Design

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has led to the adoption of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures that dynamically leverage specialized subnetworks for improved efficiency and performance. Despite their benefits, MoE models face significant challenges during inference, including inefficient memory management and suboptimal batching, due to misaligned design choices between the model architecture and the system policies. Furthermore, the conventional approach of training MoEs from scratch is increasingly prohibitive in terms of cost. In this paper, we propose a novel framework Read-ME that transforms pre-trained dense LLMs into smaller MoE models (in contrast to "upcycling" generalist MoEs), avoiding the high costs of ground-up training. Our approach employs activation sparsity to extract experts. To compose experts, we examine the widely-adopted layer-wise router design and show its redundancy, and thus we introduce the pre-gating router decoupled from the MoE backbone that facilitates system-friendly pre-computing and lookahead scheduling, enhancing expert-aware batching and caching. Our codesign therefore addresses critical gaps on both the algorithmic and system fronts, establishing a scalable and efficient alternative for LLM inference in resource-constrained settings. Read-ME outperforms other popular open-source dense models of similar scales, achieving improvements of up to 10.1% on MMLU, and improving mean end-to-end latency up to 6.1%. Codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/READ-ME.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024 2

D-CoDe: Scaling Image-Pretrained VLMs to Video via Dynamic Compression and Question Decomposition

Video large language models (Vid-LLMs), which excel in diverse video-language tasks, can be effectively constructed by adapting image-pretrained vision-language models (VLMs). However, this adaptation remains challenging, as it requires processing dense and temporally extended visual inputs that exceed the capacity of image-based models. This paper identifies the perception bottleneck and token overload as key challenges in extending image-based VLMs to the video domain. To address these issues, we propose D-CoDe, a training-free adaptation framework that incorporates dynamic compression and question decomposition. Specifically, dynamic compression alleviates the perception bottleneck through adaptive selection of representative frames and content-aware aggregation of spatial tokens, thereby reducing redundancy while preserving informative content. In parallel, question decomposition mitigates token overload by reformulating the original query into sub-questions, guiding the model to focus on distinct aspects of the video and enabling more comprehensive understanding. Experiments demonstrate that D-CoDe effectively improves video understanding across various benchmarks. Furthermore, strong performance on the challenging long-video benchmark highlights the potential of D-CoDe in handling complex video-language tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/hukcc/D-CoDe.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025

Urban Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models for Climate-Resilient Housing: Scaling Diffusion Transformers for Disaster Risk Prediction

Climate hazards increasingly disrupt urban transportation and emergency-response operations by damaging housing stock, degrading infrastructure, and reducing network accessibility. This paper presents Skjold-DiT, a diffusion-transformer framework that integrates heterogeneous spatio-temporal urban data to forecast building-level climate-risk indicators while explicitly incorporating transportation-network structure and accessibility signals relevant to intelligent vehicles (e.g., emergency reachability and evacuation-route constraints). Concretely, Skjold-DiT enables hazard-conditioned routing constraints by producing calibrated, uncertainty-aware accessibility layers (reachability, travel-time inflation, and route redundancy) that can be consumed by intelligent-vehicle routing and emergency dispatch systems. Skjold-DiT combines: (1) Fjell-Prompt, a prompt-based conditioning interface designed to support cross-city transfer; (2) Norrland-Fusion, a cross-modal attention mechanism unifying hazard maps/imagery, building attributes, demographics, and transportation infrastructure into a shared latent representation; and (3) Valkyrie-Forecast, a counterfactual simulator for generating probabilistic risk trajectories under intervention prompts. We introduce the Baltic-Caspian Urban Resilience (BCUR) dataset with 847,392 building-level observations across six cities, including multi-hazard annotations (e.g., flood and heat indicators) and transportation accessibility features. Experiments evaluate prediction quality, cross-city generalization, calibration, and downstream transportation-relevant outcomes, including reachability and hazard-conditioned travel times under counterfactual interventions.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 5 2

SimpleMem: Efficient Lifelong Memory for LLM Agents

To support reliable long-term interaction in complex environments, LLM agents require memory systems that efficiently manage historical experiences. Existing approaches either retain full interaction histories via passive context extension, leading to substantial redundancy, or rely on iterative reasoning to filter noise, incurring high token costs. To address this challenge, we introduce SimpleMem, an efficient memory framework based on semantic lossless compression. We propose a three-stage pipeline designed to maximize information density and token utilization: (1) Semantic Structured Compression, which applies entropy-aware filtering to distill unstructured interactions into compact, multi-view indexed memory units; (2) Recursive Memory Consolidation, an asynchronous process that integrates related units into higher-level abstract representations to reduce redundancy; and (3) Adaptive Query-Aware Retrieval, which dynamically adjusts retrieval scope based on query complexity to construct precise context efficiently. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms baseline approaches in accuracy, retrieval efficiency, and inference cost, achieving an average F1 improvement of 26.4% while reducing inference-time token consumption by up to 30-fold, demonstrating a superior balance between performance and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SimpleMem.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 5 3

EfficientVLA: Training-Free Acceleration and Compression for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, particularly diffusion-based architectures, demonstrate transformative potential for embodied intelligence but are severely hampered by high computational and memory demands stemming from extensive inherent and inference-time redundancies. While existing acceleration efforts often target isolated inefficiencies, such piecemeal solutions typically fail to holistically address the varied computational and memory bottlenecks across the entire VLA pipeline, thereby limiting practical deployability. We introduce EfficientVLA, a structured and training-free inference acceleration framework that systematically eliminates these barriers by cohesively exploiting multifaceted redundancies. EfficientVLA synergistically integrates three targeted strategies: (1) pruning of functionally inconsequential layers from the language module, guided by an analysis of inter-layer redundancies; (2) optimizing the visual processing pathway through a task-aware strategy that selects a compact, diverse set of visual tokens, balancing task-criticality with informational coverage; and (3) alleviating temporal computational redundancy within the iterative diffusion-based action head by strategically caching and reusing key intermediate features. We apply our method to a standard VLA model CogACT, yielding a 1.93X inference speedup and reduces FLOPs to 28.9%, with only a 0.6% success rate drop in the SIMPLER benchmark.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025 2

ZPressor: Bottleneck-Aware Compression for Scalable Feed-Forward 3DGS

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models have recently emerged as a promising solution for novel view synthesis, enabling one-pass inference without the need for per-scene 3DGS optimization. However, their scalability is fundamentally constrained by the limited capacity of their encoders, leading to degraded performance or excessive memory consumption as the number of input views increases. In this work, we analyze feed-forward 3DGS frameworks through the lens of the Information Bottleneck principle and introduce ZPressor, a lightweight architecture-agnostic module that enables efficient compression of multi-view inputs into a compact latent state Z that retains essential scene information while discarding redundancy. Concretely, ZPressor enables existing feed-forward 3DGS models to scale to over 100 input views at 480P resolution on an 80GB GPU, by partitioning the views into anchor and support sets and using cross attention to compress the information from the support views into anchor views, forming the compressed latent state Z. We show that integrating ZPressor into several state-of-the-art feed-forward 3DGS models consistently improves performance under moderate input views and enhances robustness under dense view settings on two large-scale benchmarks DL3DV-10K and RealEstate10K. The video results, code and trained models are available on our project page: https://lhmd.top/zpressor.

ziplab ZIP Lab
·
May 29, 2025 5

SRPO: Enhancing Multimodal LLM Reasoning via Reflection-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising capabilities in reasoning tasks, yet still struggle with complex problems requiring explicit self-reflection and self-correction, especially compared to their unimodal text-based counterparts. Existing reflection methods are simplistic and struggle to generate meaningful and instructive feedback, as the reasoning ability and knowledge limits of pre-trained models are largely fixed during initial training. To overcome these challenges, we propose Multimodal Self-Reflection enhanced reasoning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (SRPO), a two-stage reflection-aware reinforcement learning (RL) framework explicitly designed to enhance multimodal LLM reasoning. In the first stage, we construct a high-quality, reflection-focused dataset under the guidance of an advanced MLLM, which generates reflections based on initial responses to help the policy model learn both reasoning and self-reflection. In the second stage, we introduce a novel reward mechanism within the GRPO framework that encourages concise and cognitively meaningful reflection while avoiding redundancy. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks, including MathVista, MathVision, MathVerse, and MMMU-Pro, using Qwen-2.5-VL-7B and Qwen-2.5-VL-32B demonstrate that SRPO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving notable improvements in both reasoning accuracy and reflection quality.

  • 13 authors
·
Jun 2, 2025 2

Memory-Efficient Visual Autoregressive Modeling with Scale-Aware KV Cache Compression

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling has garnered significant attention for its innovative next-scale prediction approach, which yields substantial improvements in efficiency, scalability, and zero-shot generalization. Nevertheless, the coarse-to-fine methodology inherent in VAR results in exponential growth of the KV cache during inference, causing considerable memory consumption and computational redundancy. To address these bottlenecks, we introduce ScaleKV, a novel KV cache compression framework tailored for VAR architectures. ScaleKV leverages two critical observations: varying cache demands across transformer layers and distinct attention patterns at different scales. Based on these insights, ScaleKV categorizes transformer layers into two functional groups: drafters and refiners. Drafters exhibit dispersed attention across multiple scales, thereby requiring greater cache capacity. Conversely, refiners focus attention on the current token map to process local details, consequently necessitating substantially reduced cache capacity. ScaleKV optimizes the multi-scale inference pipeline by identifying scale-specific drafters and refiners, facilitating differentiated cache management tailored to each scale. Evaluation on the state-of-the-art text-to-image VAR model family, Infinity, demonstrates that our approach effectively reduces the required KV cache memory to 10% while preserving pixel-level fidelity.

  • 4 authors
·
May 26, 2025 2

ARTDECO: Towards Efficient and High-Fidelity On-the-Fly 3D Reconstruction with Structured Scene Representation

On-the-fly 3D reconstruction from monocular image sequences is a long-standing challenge in computer vision, critical for applications such as real-to-sim, AR/VR, and robotics. Existing methods face a major tradeoff: per-scene optimization yields high fidelity but is computationally expensive, whereas feed-forward foundation models enable real-time inference but struggle with accuracy and robustness. In this work, we propose ARTDECO, a unified framework that combines the efficiency of feed-forward models with the reliability of SLAM-based pipelines. ARTDECO uses 3D foundation models for pose estimation and point prediction, coupled with a Gaussian decoder that transforms multi-scale features into structured 3D Gaussians. To sustain both fidelity and efficiency at scale, we design a hierarchical Gaussian representation with a LoD-aware rendering strategy, which improves rendering fidelity while reducing redundancy. Experiments on eight diverse indoor and outdoor benchmarks show that ARTDECO delivers interactive performance comparable to SLAM, robustness similar to feed-forward systems, and reconstruction quality close to per-scene optimization, providing a practical path toward on-the-fly digitization of real-world environments with both accurate geometry and high visual fidelity. Explore more demos on our project page: https://city-super.github.io/artdeco/.

shanghai ailab
·
Oct 9, 2025 2

Pruning-aware Sparse Regularization for Network Pruning

Structural neural network pruning aims to remove the redundant channels in the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by pruning the filters of less importance to the final output accuracy. To reduce the degradation of performance after pruning, many methods utilize the loss with sparse regularization to produce structured sparsity. In this paper, we analyze these sparsity-training-based methods and find that the regularization of unpruned channels is unnecessary. Moreover, it restricts the network's capacity, which leads to under-fitting. To solve this problem, we propose a novel pruning method, named MaskSparsity, with pruning-aware sparse regularization. MaskSparsity imposes the fine-grained sparse regularization on the specific filters selected by a pruning mask, rather than all the filters of the model. Before the fine-grained sparse regularization of MaskSparity, we can use many methods to get the pruning mask, such as running the global sparse regularization. MaskSparsity achieves 63.03%-FLOPs reduction on ResNet-110 by removing 60.34% of the parameters, with no top-1 accuracy loss on CIFAR-10. On ILSVRC-2012, MaskSparsity reduces more than 51.07% FLOPs on ResNet-50, with only a loss of 0.76% in the top-1 accuracy. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/MaskSparsity. Moreover, we have integrated the code of MaskSparity into a PyTorch pruning toolkit, EasyPruner, at https://gitee.com/casia_iva_engineer/easypruner.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 18, 2022

VLA-Pruner: Temporal-Aware Dual-Level Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Inference

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown great promise for embodied AI, yet the heavy computational cost of processing continuous visual streams severely limits their real-time deployment. Token pruning (keeping salient visual tokens and dropping redundant ones) has emerged as an effective approach for accelerating Vision-Language Models (VLMs), offering a solution for efficient VLA. However, these VLM-specific token pruning methods select tokens based solely on semantic salience metrics (e.g., prefill attention), while overlooking the VLA's intrinsic dual-system nature of high-level semantic understanding and low-level action execution. Consequently, these methods bias token retention toward semantic cues, discard critical information for action generation, and significantly degrade VLA performance. To bridge this gap, we propose VLA-Pruner, a versatile plug-and-play VLA-specific token prune method that aligns with the dual-system nature of VLA models and exploits the temporal continuity in robot manipulation. Specifically, VLA-Pruner adopts a dual-level importance criterion for visual token retention: vision-language prefill attention for semantic-level relevance and action decode attention, estimated via temporal smoothing, for action-level importance. Based on this criterion, VLA-Pruner proposes a novel dual-level token selection strategy that adaptively preserves a compact, informative set of visual tokens for both semantic understanding and action execution under given compute budget. Experiments show that VLA-Pruner achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple VLA architectures and diverse robotic tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 20, 2025

ViSpec: Accelerating Vision-Language Models with Vision-Aware Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding is a widely adopted technique for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs), yet its application to vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored, with existing methods achieving only modest speedups (<1.5x). This gap is increasingly significant as multimodal capabilities become central to large-scale models. We hypothesize that large VLMs can effectively filter redundant image information layer by layer without compromising textual comprehension, whereas smaller draft models struggle to do so. To address this, we introduce Vision-Aware Speculative Decoding (ViSpec), a novel framework tailored for VLMs. ViSpec employs a lightweight vision adaptor module to compress image tokens into a compact representation, which is seamlessly integrated into the draft model's attention mechanism while preserving original image positional information. Additionally, we extract a global feature vector for each input image and augment all subsequent text tokens with this feature to enhance multimodal coherence. To overcome the scarcity of multimodal datasets with long assistant responses, we curate a specialized training dataset by repurposing existing datasets and generating extended outputs using the target VLM with modified prompts. Our training strategy mitigates the risk of the draft model exploiting direct access to the target model's hidden states, which could otherwise lead to shortcut learning when training solely on target model outputs. Extensive experiments validate ViSpec, achieving, to our knowledge, the first substantial speedup in VLM speculative decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/KangJialiang/ViSpec.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025

Exploring Temporally-Aware Features for Point Tracking

Point tracking in videos is a fundamental task with applications in robotics, video editing, and more. While many vision tasks benefit from pre-trained feature backbones to improve generalizability, point tracking has primarily relied on simpler backbones trained from scratch on synthetic data, which may limit robustness in real-world scenarios. Additionally, point tracking requires temporal awareness to ensure coherence across frames, but using temporally-aware features is still underexplored. Most current methods often employ a two-stage process: an initial coarse prediction followed by a refinement stage to inject temporal information and correct errors from the coarse stage. These approach, however, is computationally expensive and potentially redundant if the feature backbone itself captures sufficient temporal information. In this work, we introduce Chrono, a feature backbone specifically designed for point tracking with built-in temporal awareness. Leveraging pre-trained representations from self-supervised learner DINOv2 and enhanced with a temporal adapter, Chrono effectively captures long-term temporal context, enabling precise prediction even without the refinement stage. Experimental results demonstrate that Chrono achieves state-of-the-art performance in a refiner-free setting on the TAP-Vid-DAVIS and TAP-Vid-Kinetics datasets, among common feature backbones used in point tracking as well as DINOv2, with exceptional efficiency. Project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/Chrono/

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 21, 2025

PEAR: Phase Entropy Aware Reward for Efficient Reasoning

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks by generating detailed chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, these responses are often excessively long, containing redundant reasoning steps that inflate inference cost and reduce usability. Controlling the length of generated reasoning without sacrificing accuracy remains an open challenge. Through a systematic empirical analysis, we reveal a consistent positive correlation between model entropy and response length at different reasoning stages across diverse LRMs: the thinking phase exhibits higher entropy, reflecting exploratory behavior of longer responses, while the final answer phase shows lower entropy, indicating a more deterministic solution. This observation suggests that entropy at different reasoning stages can serve as a control knob for balancing conciseness and performance. Based on this insight, this paper introduces Phase Entropy Aware Reward (PEAR), a reward mechanism that incorporating phase-dependent entropy into the reward design. Instead of treating all tokens uniformly, PEAR penalize excessive entropy during the thinking phase and allowing moderate exploration at the final answer phase, which encourages models to generate concise reasoning traces that retain sufficient flexibility to solve the task correctly. This enables adaptive control of response length without relying on explicit length targets or rigid truncation rules. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that PEAR consistently reduces response length while sustaining competitive accuracy across model scales. In addition, PEAR demonstrates strong out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness beyond the training distribution. Our code is available at: https://github.com/iNLP-Lab/PEAR.

iNLP-Lab iNLP Lab @ SUTD
·
Oct 9, 2025 2

CC-VQA: Conflict- and Correlation-Aware Method for Mitigating Knowledge Conflict in Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) demonstrates significant potential for handling knowledge-intensive tasks. However, conflicts arise between static parametric knowledge in vision language models (VLMs) and dynamically retrieved information due to the static model knowledge from pre-training. The outputs either ignore retrieved contexts or exhibit inconsistent integration with parametric knowledge, posing substantial challenges for KB-VQA. Current knowledge conflict mitigation methods primarily adapted from language-based approaches, focusing on context-level conflicts through engineered prompting strategies or context-aware decoding mechanisms. However, these methods neglect the critical role of visual information in conflicts and suffer from redundant retrieved contexts, which impair accurate conflict identification and effective mitigation. To address these limitations, we propose CC-VQA: a novel training-free, conflict- and correlation-aware method for KB-VQA. Our method comprises two core components: (1) Vision-Centric Contextual Conflict Reasoning, which performs visual-semantic conflict analysis across internal and external knowledge contexts; and (2) Correlation-Guided Encoding and Decoding, featuring positional encoding compression for low-correlation statements and adaptive decoding using correlation-weighted conflict scoring. Extensive evaluations on E-VQA, InfoSeek, and OK-VQA benchmarks demonstrate that CC-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding absolute accuracy improvements of 3.3\% to 6.4\% compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/cqu-student/CC-VQA.

CangpoOrg Alibaba Cloud
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Feb 27 2

Octopus: A Lightweight Entity-Aware System for Multi-Table Data Discovery and Cell-Level Retrieval

Tabular data constitute a dominant form of information in modern data lakes and repositories, yet discovering the relevant tables to answer user questions remains challenging. Existing data discovery systems assume that each question can be answered by a single table and often rely on resource-intensive offline preprocessing, such as model training or large-scale content indexing. In practice, however, many questions require information spread across multiple tables -- either independently or through joins -- and users often seek specific cell values rather than entire tables. In this paper, we present Octopus, a lightweight, entity-aware, and training-free system for multi-table data discovery and cell-level value retrieval. Instead of embedding entire questions, Octopus identifies fine-grained entities (column mentions and value mentions) from natural-language queries using an LLM parser. It then matches these entities to table headers through a compact embedding index and scans table contents directly for value occurrences, eliminating the need for heavy content indexing or costly offline stages. The resulting fine-grained alignment not only improves table retrieval accuracy but also facilitates efficient downstream NL2SQL execution by reducing token usage and redundant LLM calls. To evaluate Octopus, we introduce a new benchmark covering both table- and cell-level discovery under multi-table settings, including five datasets for independent discovery and two for join-based discovery. Experimental results show that Octopus consistently outperforms existing systems while achieving substantially lower computational and token costs. Code is available at https://github.com/wenzhilics/octopus.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 5

HADSF: Aspect Aware Semantic Control for Explainable Recommendation

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) promise more effective information extraction for review-based recommender systems, yet current methods still (i) mine free-form reviews without scope control, producing redundant and noisy representations, (ii) lack principled metrics that link LLM hallucination to downstream effectiveness, and (iii) leave the cost-quality trade-off across model scales largely unexplored. We address these gaps with the Hyper-Adaptive Dual-Stage Semantic Framework (HADSF), a two-stage approach that first induces a compact, corpus-level aspect vocabulary via adaptive selection and then performs vocabulary-guided, explicitly constrained extraction of structured aspect-opinion triples. To assess the fidelity of the resulting representations, we introduce Aspect Drift Rate (ADR) and Opinion Fidelity Rate (OFR) and empirically uncover a nonmonotonic relationship between hallucination severity and rating prediction error. Experiments on approximately 3 million reviews across LLMs spanning 1.5B-70B parameters show that, when integrated into standard rating predictors, HADSF yields consistent reductions in prediction error and enables smaller models to achieve competitive performance in representative deployment scenarios. We release code, data pipelines, and metric implementations to support reproducible research on hallucination-aware, LLM-enhanced explainable recommendation. Code is available at https://github.com/niez233/HADSF

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 30, 2025

Compute-Optimal Quantization-Aware Training

Quantization-aware training (QAT) is a leading technique for improving the accuracy of quantized neural networks. Previous work has shown that decomposing training into a full-precision (FP) phase followed by a QAT phase yields superior accuracy compared to QAT alone. However, the optimal allocation of compute between the FP and QAT phases remains unclear. We conduct extensive experiments with various compute budgets, QAT bit widths, and model sizes from 86.0M to 2.2B to investigate how different QAT durations impact final performance. We demonstrate that, contrary to previous findings, the loss-optimal ratio of QAT to FP training increases with the total amount of compute. Moreover, the optimal fraction can be accurately predicted for a wide range of model sizes and quantization widths using the tokens-per-parameter-byte statistic. From experimental data, we derive a loss scaling law that predicts both optimal QAT ratios and final model performance across different QAT/FP compute allocation strategies and QAT bit widths. We use the scaling law to make further predictions, which we verify experimentally, including which QAT bit width is optimal under a given memory constraint and how QAT accuracy with different bit widths compares to full-precision model accuracy. Additionally, we propose a novel cooldown and QAT fusion approach that performs learning rate decay jointly with quantization-aware training, eliminating redundant full-precision model updates and achieving significant compute savings. These findings provide practical insights into efficient QAT planning and enable the training of higher-quality quantized models with the same compute budget.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

CodeFuse-CR-Bench: A Comprehensiveness-aware Benchmark for End-to-End Code Review Evaluation in Python Projects

Automated code review (CR) is a key application for Large Language Models (LLMs), but progress is hampered by a "reality gap": existing benchmarks evaluate models on isolated sub-tasks using simplified, context-poor data. This fails to reflect the holistic context-rich nature of real-world CR. To bridge this gap, we introduce CodeFuse-CR-Bench, the first comprehensiveness-aware benchmark for repository-level CR evaluation. CodeFuse-CR-Bench comprises 601 high-quality instances from 70 Python projects covering nine Pull-Request (PR) problem domains, where each instance provides rich, multi-faceted context including the associated issue, PR details, and repository state, enabling end-to-end evaluation. Beyond superficial metrics, we also propose a novel evaluation framework that combines rule-based checks for location and syntax with model-based judgments of review quality. We present the first large-scale assessment of state-of-the-art LLMs on this comprehensive CR task. Our results establish crucial baselines and reveal that (1) no single LLM dominates all aspects of CR; (2) Gemini 2.5 Pro achieves the highest comprehensive performance; and (3) different LLMs exhibit varying robustness to redundant context. These findings highlight the necessity of holistic, multi-dimensional evaluation and provide actionable insights for advancing truly intelligent yet practical CR assistants.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 18, 2025 2

RCR-Router: Efficient Role-Aware Context Routing for Multi-Agent LLM Systems with Structured Memory

Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems have shown strong potential in complex reasoning and collaborative decision-making tasks. However, most existing coordination schemes rely on static or full-context routing strategies, which lead to excessive token consumption, redundant memory exposure, and limited adaptability across interaction rounds. We introduce RCR-Router, a modular and role-aware context routing framework designed to enable efficient, adaptive collaboration in multi-agent LLMs. To our knowledge, this is the first routing approach that dynamically selects semantically relevant memory subsets for each agent based on its role and task stage, while adhering to a strict token budget. A lightweight scoring policy guides memory selection, and agent outputs are iteratively integrated into a shared memory store to facilitate progressive context refinement. To better evaluate model behavior, we further propose an Answer Quality Score metric that captures LLM-generated explanations beyond standard QA accuracy. Experiments on three multi-hop QA benchmarks -- HotPotQA, MuSiQue, and 2WikiMultihop -- demonstrate that RCR-Router reduces token usage (up to 30%) while improving or maintaining answer quality. These results highlight the importance of structured memory routing and output-aware evaluation in advancing scalable multi-agent LLM systems.

  • 15 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

Rethinking Multi-Condition DiTs: Eliminating Redundant Attention via Position-Alignment and Keyword-Scoping

While modern text-to-image models excel at prompt-based generation, they often lack the fine-grained control necessary for specific user requirements like spatial layouts or subject appearances. Multi-condition control addresses this, yet its integration into Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) is bottlenecked by the conventional ``concatenate-and-attend'' strategy, which suffers from quadratic computational and memory overhead as the number of conditions scales. Our analysis reveals that much of this cross-modal interaction is spatially or semantically redundant. To this end, we propose Position-aligned and Keyword-scoped Attention (PKA), a highly efficient framework designed to eliminate these redundancies. Specifically, Position-Aligned Attention (PAA) linearizes spatial control by enforcing localized patch alignment, while Keyword-Scoped Attention (KSA) prunes irrelevant subject-driven interactions via semantic-aware masking. To facilitate efficient learning, we further introduce a Conditional Sensitivity-Aware Sampling (CSAS) strategy that reweights the training objective towards critical denoising phases, drastically accelerating convergence and enhancing conditional fidelity. Empirically, PKA delivers a 10.0times inference speedup and a 5.1times VRAM saving, providing a scalable and resource-friendly solution for high-fidelity multi-conditioned generation.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 6

SmartDoc: A Context-Aware Agentic Method Comment Generation Plugin

Context: The software maintenance phase involves many activities such as code refactoring, bug fixing, code review or testing. Program comprehension is key to all these activities, as it demands developers to grasp the knowledge (e.g., implementation details) required to modify the codebase. Methods as main building blocks in a program can offer developers this knowledge source for code comprehension. However, reading entire method statements can be challenging, which necessitates precise and up-to-date comments. Objective: We propose a solution as an IntelliJ IDEA plugin, named SmartDoc, that assists developers in generating context-aware method comments. Method: This plugin acts as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent that has its own memory and is augmented by target methods' context. When a request is initiated by the end-user, the method content and all its nested method calls are used in the comment generation. At the beginning, these nested methods are visited and a call graph is generated. This graph is then traversed using depth-first search (DFS), enabling the provision of full-context to enrich Large Language Model (LLM) prompts. Result: The product is a software, as a plugin, developed for Java codebase and installable on IntelliJ IDEA. This plugin can serve concurrently for methods whose comments are being updated , and it shares memory across all flows to avoid redundant calls. o measure the accuracy of this solution, a dedicated test case is run to record SmartDoc generated comments and their corresponding ground truth. For each collected result-set, three metrics are computed, BERTScore, BLEU and ROUGE-1. These metrics will determine how accurate the generated comments are in comparison to the ground truth. Result: The obtained accuracy, in terms of the precision, recall and F1, is promising, and lies in the range of 0.80 to 0.90 for BERTScore.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 1, 2025

VASparse: Towards Efficient Visual Hallucination Mitigation via Visual-Aware Token Sparsification

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) may produce outputs that are unfaithful to reality, also known as visual hallucinations (VH), which significantly impedes their real-world usage. To alleviate VH, various decoding strategies have been proposed to enhance visual information. However, many of these methods may require secondary decoding and rollback, which significantly reduces inference speed. In this work, we propose an efficient plug-and-play decoding algorithm via Visual-Aware Sparsification (VASparse) from the perspective of token sparsity for mitigating VH. VASparse is inspired by empirical observations: (1) the sparse activation of attention in LVLMs, and (2) visual-agnostic tokens sparsification exacerbates VH. Based on these insights, we propose a novel token sparsification strategy that balances efficiency and trustworthiness. Specifically, VASparse implements a visual-aware token selection strategy during decoding to reduce redundant tokens while preserving visual context effectively. Additionally, we innovatively introduce a sparse-based visual contrastive decoding method to recalibrate the distribution of hallucinated outputs without the time overhead associated with secondary decoding. Subsequently, VASparse recalibrates attention scores to penalize attention sinking of LVLMs towards text tokens. Extensive experiments across four popular benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of VASparse in mitigating VH across different LVLM families without requiring additional training or post-processing. Impressively, VASparse achieves state-of-the-art performance for mitigating VH while maintaining competitive decoding speed. Code is available at https://github.com/mengchuang123/VASparse-github.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 11, 2025

COOPERTRIM: Adaptive Data Selection for Uncertainty-Aware Cooperative Perception

Cooperative perception enables autonomous agents to share encoded representations over wireless communication to enhance each other's live situational awareness. However, the tension between the limited communication bandwidth and the rich sensor information hinders its practical deployment. Recent studies have explored selection strategies that share only a subset of features per frame while striving to keep the performance on par. Nevertheless, the bandwidth requirement still stresses current wireless technologies. To fundamentally ease the tension, we take a proactive approach, exploiting the temporal continuity to identify features that capture environment dynamics, while avoiding repetitive and redundant transmission of static information. By incorporating temporal awareness, agents are empowered to dynamically adapt the sharing quantity according to environment complexity. We instantiate this intuition into an adaptive selection framework, COOPERTRIM, which introduces a novel conformal temporal uncertainty metric to gauge feature relevance, and a data-driven mechanism to dynamically determine the sharing quantity. To evaluate COOPERTRIM, we take semantic segmentation and 3D detection as example tasks. Across multiple open-source cooperative segmentation and detection models, COOPERTRIM achieves up to 80.28% and 72.52% bandwidth reduction respectively while maintaining a comparable accuracy. Relative to other selection strategies, COOPERTRIM also improves IoU by as much as 45.54% with up to 72% less bandwidth. Combined with compression strategies, COOPERTRIM can further reduce bandwidth usage to as low as 1.46% without compromising IoU performance. Qualitative results show COOPERTRIM gracefully adapts to environmental dynamics, localization error, and communication latency, demonstrating flexibility and paving the way for real-world deployment.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 7

Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning

Drone-based vehicle detection aims at finding the vehicle locations and categories in an aerial image. It empowers smart city traffic management and disaster rescue. Researchers have made mount of efforts in this area and achieved considerable progress. Nevertheless, it is still a challenge when the objects are hard to distinguish, especially in low light conditions. To tackle this problem, we construct a large-scale drone-based RGB-Infrared vehicle detection dataset, termed DroneVehicle. Our DroneVehicle collects 28, 439 RGB-Infrared image pairs, covering urban roads, residential areas, parking lots, and other scenarios from day to night. Due to the great gap between RGB and infrared images, cross-modal images provide both effective information and redundant information. To address this dilemma, we further propose an uncertainty-aware cross-modality vehicle detection (UA-CMDet) framework to extract complementary information from cross-modal images, which can significantly improve the detection performance in low light conditions. An uncertainty-aware module (UAM) is designed to quantify the uncertainty weights of each modality, which is calculated by the cross-modal Intersection over Union (IoU) and the RGB illumination value. Furthermore, we design an illumination-aware cross-modal non-maximum suppression algorithm to better integrate the modal-specific information in the inference phase. Extensive experiments on the DroneVehicle dataset demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed method for crossmodality vehicle detection. The dataset can be download from https://github.com/VisDrone/DroneVehicle.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 5, 2020

Deep Forcing: Training-Free Long Video Generation with Deep Sink and Participative Compression

Recent advances in autoregressive video diffusion have enabled real-time frame streaming, yet existing solutions still suffer from temporal repetition, drift, and motion deceleration. We find that naively applying StreamingLLM-style attention sinks to video diffusion leads to fidelity degradation and motion stagnation. To overcome this, we introduce Deep Forcing, which consists of two training-free mechanisms that address this without any fine-tuning. Specifically, 1) Deep Sink dedicates half of the sliding window to persistent sink tokens and re-aligns their temporal RoPE phase to the current timeline, stabilizing global context during long rollouts. 2) Participative Compression performs importance-aware KV cache pruning that preserves only tokens actively participating in recent attention while safely discarding redundant and degraded history, minimizing error accumulation under out-of-distribution length generation. Together, these components enable over 12x extrapolation (e.g. 5s-trained to 60s+ generation) with better imaging quality than LongLive, better aesthetic quality than RollingForcing, almost maintaining overall consistency, and substantial gains in dynamic degree, all while maintaining real-time generation. Our results demonstrate that training-free KV-cache management can match or exceed training-based approaches for autoregressively streaming long-video generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025 2

Rethinking Rubric Generation for Improving LLM Judge and Reward Modeling for Open-ended Tasks

Recently, rubrics have been used to guide LLM judges in capturing subjective, nuanced, multi-dimensional human preferences, and have been extended from evaluation to reward signals for reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). However, rubric generation remains hard to control: rubrics often lack coverage, conflate dimensions, misalign preference direction, and contain redundant or highly correlated criteria, degrading judge accuracy and producing suboptimal rewards during RFT. We propose RRD, a principled framework for rubric refinement built on a recursive decompose-filter cycle. RRD decomposes coarse rubrics into fine-grained, discriminative criteria, expanding coverage while sharpening separation between responses. A complementary filtering mechanism removes misaligned and redundant rubrics, and a correlation-aware weighting scheme prevents over-representing highly correlated criteria, yielding rubric sets that are informative, comprehensive, and non-redundant. Empirically, RRD delivers large, consistent gains across both evaluation and training: it improves preference-judgment accuracy on JudgeBench and PPE for both GPT-4o and Llama3.1-405B judges, achieving top performance in all settings with up to +17.7 points on JudgeBench. When used as the reward source for RFT on WildChat, it yields substantially stronger and more stable learning signals, boosting reward by up to 160% (Qwen3-4B) and 60% (Llama3.1-8B) versus 10-20% for prior rubric baselines, with gains that transfer to HealthBench-Hard and BiGGen Bench. Overall, RRD establishes recursive rubric refinement as a scalable and interpretable foundation for LLM judging and reward modeling in open-ended domains.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 4

VideoScene: Distilling Video Diffusion Model to Generate 3D Scenes in One Step

Recovering 3D scenes from sparse views is a challenging task due to its inherent ill-posed problem. Conventional methods have developed specialized solutions (e.g., geometry regularization or feed-forward deterministic model) to mitigate the issue. However, they still suffer from performance degradation by minimal overlap across input views with insufficient visual information. Fortunately, recent video generative models show promise in addressing this challenge as they are capable of generating video clips with plausible 3D structures. Powered by large pretrained video diffusion models, some pioneering research start to explore the potential of video generative prior and create 3D scenes from sparse views. Despite impressive improvements, they are limited by slow inference time and the lack of 3D constraint, leading to inefficiencies and reconstruction artifacts that do not align with real-world geometry structure. In this paper, we propose VideoScene to distill the video diffusion model to generate 3D scenes in one step, aiming to build an efficient and effective tool to bridge the gap from video to 3D. Specifically, we design a 3D-aware leap flow distillation strategy to leap over time-consuming redundant information and train a dynamic denoising policy network to adaptively determine the optimal leap timestep during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VideoScene achieves faster and superior 3D scene generation results than previous video diffusion models, highlighting its potential as an efficient tool for future video to 3D applications. Project Page: https://hanyang-21.github.io/VideoScene

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 2, 2025 2

DKPLM: Decomposable Knowledge-enhanced Pre-trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding

Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KEPLMs) are pre-trained models with relation triples injecting from knowledge graphs to improve language understanding abilities. To guarantee effective knowledge injection, previous studies integrate models with knowledge encoders for representing knowledge retrieved from knowledge graphs. The operations for knowledge retrieval and encoding bring significant computational burdens, restricting the usage of such models in real-world applications that require high inference speed. In this paper, we propose a novel KEPLM named DKPLM that Decomposes Knowledge injection process of the Pre-trained Language Models in pre-training, fine-tuning and inference stages, which facilitates the applications of KEPLMs in real-world scenarios. Specifically, we first detect knowledge-aware long-tail entities as the target for knowledge injection, enhancing the KEPLMs' semantic understanding abilities and avoiding injecting redundant information. The embeddings of long-tail entities are replaced by "pseudo token representations" formed by relevant knowledge triples. We further design the relational knowledge decoding task for pre-training to force the models to truly understand the injected knowledge by relation triple reconstruction. Experiments show that our model outperforms other KEPLMs significantly over zero-shot knowledge probing tasks and multiple knowledge-aware language understanding tasks. We further show that DKPLM has a higher inference speed than other competing models due to the decomposing mechanism.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 2, 2021