CS-VLM: Compressed Sensing Attention for Efficient Vision-Language Representation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kiruluta, Andrew, Raju, Preethi, Burity, Priscilla
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kiruluta, Andrew
Raju, Preethi
Burity, Priscilla
author_facet Kiruluta, Andrew
Raju, Preethi
Burity, Priscilla
contents Vision-Language Models (vLLMs) have emerged as powerful architectures for joint reasoning over visual and textual inputs, enabling breakthroughs in image captioning, cross modal retrieval, and multimodal dialogue. However, as these models scale to longer video sequences and richer language descriptions, the quadratic complexity of the standard attention mechanism presents a fundamental computational bottleneck. This challenge is exacerbated in vLLMs, where attention must be computed not only within modalities but also across them, leading to prohibitive memory and latency costs. In this work, we introduce the Compressed Sensing Attention Transformer (CSAT), a novel architecture that reimagines attention computation through the lens of compressed sensing. By projecting high dimensional key and value representations into a lower-dimensional subspace via random measurement matrices and reconstructing the attention outputs using sparse recovery algorithms, CSAT significantly reduces attention complexity while maintaining semantic fidelity. Applied to vLLMs, CSAT exploits the inherent compressibility of both visual and textual representations especially evident in video, where temporal redundancy is high, and in language, where cross-modal grounding is often sparse. In contrast to LLMs, which must often model entangled symbolic dependencies, vLLMs benefit from structured sparsity in alignment and scene composition, making them particularly well-suited to compressed attention. We provide a formal mathematical treatment of CSAT, demonstrate its integration into vision language pipelines, and validate its performance on standard benchmarks, highlighting its promise as a scalable, interpretable, and resource efficient solution for next generation multimodal transformers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_02957
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CS-VLM: Compressed Sensing Attention for Efficient Vision-Language Representation Learning
Kiruluta, Andrew
Raju, Preethi
Burity, Priscilla
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-Language Models (vLLMs) have emerged as powerful architectures for joint reasoning over visual and textual inputs, enabling breakthroughs in image captioning, cross modal retrieval, and multimodal dialogue. However, as these models scale to longer video sequences and richer language descriptions, the quadratic complexity of the standard attention mechanism presents a fundamental computational bottleneck. This challenge is exacerbated in vLLMs, where attention must be computed not only within modalities but also across them, leading to prohibitive memory and latency costs. In this work, we introduce the Compressed Sensing Attention Transformer (CSAT), a novel architecture that reimagines attention computation through the lens of compressed sensing. By projecting high dimensional key and value representations into a lower-dimensional subspace via random measurement matrices and reconstructing the attention outputs using sparse recovery algorithms, CSAT significantly reduces attention complexity while maintaining semantic fidelity. Applied to vLLMs, CSAT exploits the inherent compressibility of both visual and textual representations especially evident in video, where temporal redundancy is high, and in language, where cross-modal grounding is often sparse. In contrast to LLMs, which must often model entangled symbolic dependencies, vLLMs benefit from structured sparsity in alignment and scene composition, making them particularly well-suited to compressed attention. We provide a formal mathematical treatment of CSAT, demonstrate its integration into vision language pipelines, and validate its performance on standard benchmarks, highlighting its promise as a scalable, interpretable, and resource efficient solution for next generation multimodal transformers.
title CS-VLM: Compressed Sensing Attention for Efficient Vision-Language Representation Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02957