VISion On Request: Enhanced VLLM efficiency with sparse, dynamically selected, vision-language interactions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bulat, Adrian, Baldrati, Alberto, Metaxas, Ioannis Maniadis, Ouali, Yassine, Tzimiropoulos, Georgios
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Bulat, Adrian
Baldrati, Alberto
Metaxas, Ioannis Maniadis
Ouali, Yassine
Tzimiropoulos, Georgios
author_facet Bulat, Adrian
Baldrati, Alberto
Metaxas, Ioannis Maniadis
Ouali, Yassine
Tzimiropoulos, Georgios
contents Existing approaches for improving the efficiency of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are largely based on the concept of visual token reduction. This approach, however, creates an information bottleneck that impairs performance, especially on challenging tasks that require fine-grained understanding and reasoning. In this work, we challenge this paradigm by introducing VISion On Request (VISOR), a method that reduces inference cost without discarding visual information. Instead of compressing the image, VISOR improves efficiency by sparsifying the interaction between image and text tokens. Specifically, the language model attends to the full set of high-resolution visual tokens through a small, strategically placed set of attention layers: general visual context is provided by efficient cross-attention between text-image, while a few well-placed and dynamically selected self-attention layers refine the visual representations themselves, enabling complex, high-resolution reasoning when needed. Based on this principle, we first train a single universal network on a range of computational budgets by varying the number of self-attention layers, and then introduce a lightweight policy mechanism that dynamically allocates visual computation based on per-sample complexity. Extensive experiments show that VISOR drastically reduces computational cost while matching or exceeding state-of-the-art results across a diverse suite of benchmarks, and excels in challenging tasks that require detailed visual understanding.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_23495
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VISion On Request: Enhanced VLLM efficiency with sparse, dynamically selected, vision-language interactions
Bulat, Adrian
Baldrati, Alberto
Metaxas, Ioannis Maniadis
Ouali, Yassine
Tzimiropoulos, Georgios
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Existing approaches for improving the efficiency of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are largely based on the concept of visual token reduction. This approach, however, creates an information bottleneck that impairs performance, especially on challenging tasks that require fine-grained understanding and reasoning. In this work, we challenge this paradigm by introducing VISion On Request (VISOR), a method that reduces inference cost without discarding visual information. Instead of compressing the image, VISOR improves efficiency by sparsifying the interaction between image and text tokens. Specifically, the language model attends to the full set of high-resolution visual tokens through a small, strategically placed set of attention layers: general visual context is provided by efficient cross-attention between text-image, while a few well-placed and dynamically selected self-attention layers refine the visual representations themselves, enabling complex, high-resolution reasoning when needed. Based on this principle, we first train a single universal network on a range of computational budgets by varying the number of self-attention layers, and then introduce a lightweight policy mechanism that dynamically allocates visual computation based on per-sample complexity. Extensive experiments show that VISOR drastically reduces computational cost while matching or exceeding state-of-the-art results across a diverse suite of benchmarks, and excels in challenging tasks that require detailed visual understanding.
title VISion On Request: Enhanced VLLM efficiency with sparse, dynamically selected, vision-language interactions
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23495