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Main Authors: Mao, Lingjun, Corona, Rodolfo, Liang, Xin, Yan, Wenhao, Tang, Zineng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03643
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author Mao, Lingjun
Corona, Rodolfo
Liang, Xin
Yan, Wenhao
Tang, Zineng
author_facet Mao, Lingjun
Corona, Rodolfo
Liang, Xin
Yan, Wenhao
Tang, Zineng
contents Most existing vision encoders map images into a fixed-length sequence of tokens, overlooking the fact that different images contain varying amounts of information. For example, a visually complex image (e.g., a cluttered room) inherently carries more information and thus deserves more tokens than a simple image (e.g., a blank wall). To address this inefficiency, we propose DOVE, a dynamic vision encoder that produces a variable number of visual tokens (i.e., continuous representation vectors) to reconstruct each image. Our results show that DOVE significantly reduces the average number of tokens while maintaining high reconstruction quality. In several linear probing and downstream multimodal tasks, it outperforms existing autoencoder-based tokenization methods when using far fewer tokens, capturing more expressive semantic features compared to fixed-length encoding. We further extend DOVE with query-conditioned tokenization. By guiding the model to focus on query-relevant regions, it achieves more efficient and targeted semantic extraction. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://dove-encoder.github.io/dove-encoder.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03643
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Images are Worth Variable Length of Representations
Mao, Lingjun
Corona, Rodolfo
Liang, Xin
Yan, Wenhao
Tang, Zineng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Most existing vision encoders map images into a fixed-length sequence of tokens, overlooking the fact that different images contain varying amounts of information. For example, a visually complex image (e.g., a cluttered room) inherently carries more information and thus deserves more tokens than a simple image (e.g., a blank wall). To address this inefficiency, we propose DOVE, a dynamic vision encoder that produces a variable number of visual tokens (i.e., continuous representation vectors) to reconstruct each image. Our results show that DOVE significantly reduces the average number of tokens while maintaining high reconstruction quality. In several linear probing and downstream multimodal tasks, it outperforms existing autoencoder-based tokenization methods when using far fewer tokens, capturing more expressive semantic features compared to fixed-length encoding. We further extend DOVE with query-conditioned tokenization. By guiding the model to focus on query-relevant regions, it achieves more efficient and targeted semantic extraction. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://dove-encoder.github.io/dove-encoder.
title Images are Worth Variable Length of Representations
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03643