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Autori principali: Liu, Dong, Yu, Yanxuan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13204
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author Liu, Dong
Yu, Yanxuan
author_facet Liu, Dong
Yu, Yanxuan
contents As generative models scale to larger inputs across language, vision, and video domains, the cost of token-level computation has become a key bottleneck. While prior work suggests that only a subset of tokens significantly influence downstream predictions, most token selection methods are static, modality-specific, or incompatible with autoregressive generation. In this paper, we propose QuickMerge, a lightweight token merging framework designed for efficient next-token prediction. QuickMerge dynamically selects a reduced number of tokens based on attention norm magnitude, guided by an entropy-based budget estimator. To preserve autoregressive compatibility, we introduce a lightweight transformer prior trained over the merged token sequence. By combining semantic salience estimation, flexible token budgets, and AR alignment, QuickMerge enables accurate generation with fewer tokens. We evaluate QuickMerge across multi-modality domains, demonstrating consistent improvements in compute-accuracy tradeoffs. Specifically, QuickMerge reduces token counts sustantially while matching as well as exceeding the performance of learned tokenizers and fixed-patch baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_13204
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle QuickMerge++: Fast Token Merging with Autoregressive Prior
Liu, Dong
Yu, Yanxuan
Artificial Intelligence
As generative models scale to larger inputs across language, vision, and video domains, the cost of token-level computation has become a key bottleneck. While prior work suggests that only a subset of tokens significantly influence downstream predictions, most token selection methods are static, modality-specific, or incompatible with autoregressive generation. In this paper, we propose QuickMerge, a lightweight token merging framework designed for efficient next-token prediction. QuickMerge dynamically selects a reduced number of tokens based on attention norm magnitude, guided by an entropy-based budget estimator. To preserve autoregressive compatibility, we introduce a lightweight transformer prior trained over the merged token sequence. By combining semantic salience estimation, flexible token budgets, and AR alignment, QuickMerge enables accurate generation with fewer tokens. We evaluate QuickMerge across multi-modality domains, demonstrating consistent improvements in compute-accuracy tradeoffs. Specifically, QuickMerge reduces token counts sustantially while matching as well as exceeding the performance of learned tokenizers and fixed-patch baselines.
title QuickMerge++: Fast Token Merging with Autoregressive Prior
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13204