Daily Papers

We present Jina-OCR-v1, an end-to-end document parsing model built to serve on low-budget GPUs. It combines the compressed-vision encoder and the 3B mixture-of-experts decoder of DeepSeek-OCR, which activates about 570M parameters per token, with a FastMTP speculative decoding head that shares a single draft block recursively across K=3 prediction steps. Greedy verification makes decoding lossless. Post-training combines instruction alignment, robustness fine-tuning on difficult documents, and GRPO under dense verifiable rewards: deterministic formula, table, and structural checks that award partial credit. The training data mixes cleaned public corpora with targeted synthetic pages. At the default dynamic-resolution setting, Jina-OCR-v1 scores 91.14 on OmniDocBench v1.6 and 83.4 on olmOCR-Bench, and reaches the highest page throughput in our comparison at 2.57 pages per second. On a low-budget GPU such as the NVIDIA L4, FastMTP doubles decoding speed over greedy autoregressive decoding. The model is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/jinaai/jina-ocr-v1.

The fundamental challenge in scaling Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) to long-form video lies in managing the explosion of visual-token context length. Existing strategies predominantly focus on "post-hoc" token reduction -- reducing visual tokens after feature extraction to alleviate the LLM's computational overhead. While these methods effectively reduce the number of visual tokens, we observe that the primary latency bottleneck then shifts from the LLM to the expensive per-frame processing of the vision encoder. To address this, we introduce LiteFrame, a strong, yet highly efficient video encoder backbone for Video LLMs. To train LiteFrame, we propose Compressed Token Distillation (CTD), a novel training framework that teaches a compact student vision encoder to directly predict information-dense, spatio-temporally compressed representations produced by a large teacher vision model, effectively bypassing redundant computation. When coupled with further Language Model Adaptation (LMA), this approach results in a new latency-accuracy Pareto frontier -- compared with InternVL3-8B, LiteFrame provides a 35% reduction in end-to-end latency while processing 8times more frames and improves average video understanding accuracy across multiple benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a new potential path to unlocking longer-form video understanding under fixed compute budgets.

Vision-language models commonly project all tokens produced by a pretrained vision encoder into a large language model. However, final-layer features can discard text, local attributes, and spatial relationships, while high-resolution inputs substantially increase context length and inference latency. We introduce \method, a Multi-scale Adaptive Vision Encoder. \method uses position-dependent gates to fuse shallow, intermediate, and deep features from a vision Transformer, preserving global semantics while enhancing edges, text, and local structure. It then performs question-conditioned token routing according to question relevance, local information content, global semantics, and spatial coverage, with a token budget that adapts to image complexity. To mitigate compression loss, we further introduce full-to-compressed representation distillation and a spatial diversity regularizer. In an illustrative simulation under a unified 7B language-model framework, \method reduces the average number of SigLIP-SO400M visual tokens from 729 to 146 (approximately 80.0\%) and improves the mean score on VQAv2, GQA, TextVQA, ScienceQA-IMG, and MMBench by 2.2 percentage points, while reducing single-image time to first token from 228\,ms to 129\,ms. We provide the full model design and evaluation protocol. All reported numbers currently serve only as placeholders for paper organization and experimental design; formal claims require real training runs, independent replications, and official benchmark evaluation.

This paper presents a family of advanced vision encoder, named OpenVision 3, that learns a single, unified visual representation that can serve both image understanding and image generation. Our core architecture is simple: we feed VAE-compressed image latents to a ViT encoder and train its output to support two complementary roles. First, the encoder output is passed to the ViT-VAE decoder to reconstruct the original image, encouraging the representation to capture generative structure. Second, the same representation is optimized with contrastive learning and image-captioning objectives, strengthening semantic features. By jointly optimizing reconstruction- and semantics-driven signals in a shared latent space, the encoder learns representations that synergize and generalize well across both regimes. We validate this unified design through extensive downstream evaluations with the encoder frozen. For multimodal understanding, we plug the encoder into the LLaVA-1.5 framework: it performs comparably with a standard CLIP vision encoder (e.g., 62.4 vs 62.2 on SeedBench, and 83.7 vs 82.9 on POPE). For generation, we test it under the RAE framework: ours substantially surpasses the standard CLIP-based encoder (e.g., gFID: 1.89 vs 2.54 on ImageNet). We hope this work can spur future research on unified modeling.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically composed of a vision encoder, e.g. CLIP, and a language model (LM) that interprets the encoded features to solve downstream tasks. Despite remarkable progress, VLMs are subject to several shortcomings due to the limited capabilities of vision encoders, e.g. "blindness" to certain image features, visual hallucination, etc. To address these issues, we study broadening the visual encoding capabilities of VLMs. We first comprehensively benchmark several vision encoders with different inductive biases for solving VLM tasks. We observe that there is no single encoding configuration that consistently achieves top performance across different tasks, and encoders with different biases can perform surprisingly similarly. Motivated by this, we introduce a method, named BRAVE, that consolidates features from multiple frozen encoders into a more versatile representation that can be directly fed as the input to a frozen LM. BRAVE achieves state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of captioning and VQA benchmarks and significantly reduces the aforementioned issues of VLMs, while requiring a smaller number of trainable parameters than existing methods and having a more compressed representation. Our results highlight the potential of incorporating different visual biases for a more broad and contextualized visual understanding of VLMs.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) offer the exciting possibility of processing text as rendered images, bypassing the need for tokenizing the text into long token sequences. Since VLM image encoders map fixed-size images to a fixed number of visual tokens, varying rendering resolution provides a fine-grained compression knob. However, accuracy deteriorates quickly as compression increases: characters shrink below the vision encoder's effective resolution, making them indistinguishable. To address this, we propose LensVLM, an inference framework and post-training recipe that enables VLMs to scan compressed images, then selectively expand only the relevant images to their uncompressed form via learned tools. Building on Qwen3.5-9B-Base, LensVLM maintains accuracy comparable to the full-text upper bound at 4.3x effective compression and outperforms retrieval-based, text- and visual-compression baselines up to 10.1x effective compression across seven text QA benchmarks. LensVLM also generalizes to multimodal document and code understanding tasks, with the accuracy gain over baselines growing as compression increases. Our analysis validates this approach: training makes visual compression robust to rendering choices, and as compression grows the model increasingly relies on expanded content rather than unreliable visual reading. The analysis also yields practical tool-choice guidance: text expansion is preferable for rendered text, while high-resolution image expansion suits native documents whose layout cues carry task-relevant information.

How can pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models retain long-horizon visual histories with high-frequency updates without sacrificing efficiency? Existing approaches rely on external memory management, which restrains either the memory horizon or the reactiveness of pretrained policies. To this end, we present NativeMEM, a VLA policy that features long-term and real-time updated memory. At its core is an efficient memory encoding scheme, Native Memory Compression, which repurposes the VLA's own vision encoder to compress each historical frame from each camera view into a single token. Appended to the input sequence, these memory tokens enable the pretrained VLA to attend over long-term history with negligible latency overhead, requiring neither an external planner nor a freshly initialized memory module. To align the memory tokens with the pretrained policy, we first develop a generic memory tokenizer under the supervision of a frozen VLA on memory-demanding data, and then unfreeze the VLA for task-specific fine-tuning. NativeMEM consistently outperforms prior methods, boosting success rates from 32.4% to 84.0% in simulation and up to 98.7% on real robots, while maintaining low inference latency and GPU memory usage. Notably, NativeMEM exhibits high data efficiency by achieving competitive results with prior arts using only 20% of the training data.

Conventionally, memory in end-to-end robotic learning involves inputting a sequence of past observations into the learned policy. However, in complex multi-stage real-world tasks, the robot's memory must represent past events at multiple levels of granularity: from long-term memory that captures abstracted semantic concepts (e.g., a robot cooking dinner should remember which stages of the recipe are already done) to short-term memory that captures recent events and compensates for occlusions (e.g., a robot remembering the object it wants to pick up once its arm occludes it). In this work, our main insight is that an effective memory architecture for long-horizon robotic control should combine multiple modalities to capture these different levels of abstraction. We introduce Multi-Scale Embodied Memory (MEM), an approach for mixed-modal long-horizon memory in robot policies. MEM combines video-based short-horizon memory, compressed via a video encoder, with text-based long-horizon memory. Together, they enable robot policies to perform tasks that span up to fifteen minutes, like cleaning up a kitchen, or preparing a grilled cheese sandwich. Additionally, we find that memory enables MEM policies to intelligently adapt manipulation strategies in-context.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown impressive capabilities across a wide range of robotics manipulation tasks. However, their growing model size poses significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained robotic systems. While 1-bit pretraining has proven effective for enhancing the inference efficiency of large language models with minimal performance loss, its application to VLA models remains underexplored. In this work, we present BitVLA, the first 1-bit VLA model for robotics manipulation, in which every parameter is ternary, i.e., {-1, 0, 1}. To further reduce the memory footprint of the vision encoder, we propose the distillation-aware training strategy that compresses the full-precision encoder to 1.58-bit weights. During this process, a full-precision encoder serves as a teacher model to better align latent representations. Despite the lack of large-scale robotics pretraining, BitVLA achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art model OpenVLA-OFT with 4-bit post-training quantization on the LIBERO benchmark, while consuming only 29.8% of the memory. These results highlight BitVLA's promise for deployment on memory-constrained edge devices. We release the code and model weights in https://github.com/ustcwhy/BitVLA.

Video large language models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in video understanding tasks. However, their practical deployment is still hindered by the inefficiency introduced by processing massive amounts of visual tokens. Although recent approaches achieve extremely low token retention ratios while maintaining accuracy comparable to full-token baselines, most of them perform compression only at the late stage of prefilling, leaving the efficiency of the vision encoder unoptimized. In this paper, we first show that vision encoding contributes a large portion to the time-to-first-token (TTFT). Therefore, instead of compressing visual tokens only after the vision encoder, performing compression inside the encoder still leaves substantial room for exploration. Based on this insight, we propose EarlyTom, a training-free token compression framework that performs early-stage visual token compression inside the vision encoder, enabling significantly better TTFT reduction and higher throughput. In addition, we introduce a decoupled spatial token selection strategy that improves the overall compression effectiveness. EarlyTom reduces TTFT by up to 2.65x and FLOPs by up to 61% on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU for the LLaVA-OneVision-7B model, while maintaining accuracy comparable to the full-token baseline. These improvements substantially enhance the practicality of deploying Video-LLMs in real-world production scenarios.

Hypothesis. Artificial general intelligence is, at its core, a compression problem. Effective compression demands resonance: deep learning scales best when its architecture aligns with the fundamental structure of the data. These are the fundamental principles. Yet, modern vision architectures have strayed from these truths: visual signals are highly redundant, while discriminative information, the surprise, is sparse. Current models process dense pixel grids uniformly, wasting vast compute on static background rather than focusing on the predictive residuals that define motion and meaning. We argue that to solve visual understanding, we must align our architectures with the information-theoretic principles of video, i.e., Codecs. Method. OneVision-Encoder encodes video by compressing predictive visual structure into semantic meaning. By adopting Codec Patchification, OV-Encoder abandons uniform computation to focus exclusively on the 3.1%-25% of regions rich in signal entropy. To unify spatial and temporal reasoning under irregular token layouts, OneVision-Encoder employs a shared 3D RoPE and is trained with a large-scale cluster discrimination objective over more than one million semantic concepts, jointly capturing object permanence and motion dynamics. Evidence. The results validate our core hypothesis: efficiency and accuracy are not a trade-off; they are positively correlated. When integrated into LLM, it consistently outperforms strong vision backbones such as Qwen3-ViT and SigLIP2 across 16 image, video, and document understanding benchmarks, despite using substantially fewer visual tokens and pretraining data. Notably, on video understanding tasks, OV-Encoder achieves an average improvement of 4.1% over Qwen3-ViT. Codec-aligned, patch-level sparsity is a foundational principle, enabling OV-Encoder as a scalable engine for next-generation visual generalists.

Vision encoders are increasingly used in modern applications, from vision-only models to multimodal systems such as vision-language models. Despite their remarkable success, it remains unclear how these architectures represent features internally. Here, we propose a novel approach for interpreting vision features via image reconstruction. We compare two related model families, SigLIP and SigLIP2, which differ only in their training objective, and show that encoders pre-trained on image-based tasks retain significantly more image information than those trained on non-image tasks such as contrastive learning. We further apply our method to a range of vision encoders, ranking them by the informativeness of their feature representations. Finally, we demonstrate that manipulating the feature space yields predictable changes in reconstructed images, revealing that orthogonal rotations (rather than spatial transformations) control color encoding. Our approach can be applied to any vision encoder, shedding light on the inner structure of its feature space. The code and model weights to reproduce the experiments are available in GitHub.

We study neural image compression based on the Sparse Visual Representation (SVR), where images are embedded into a discrete latent space spanned by learned visual codebooks. By sharing codebooks with the decoder, the encoder transfers integer codeword indices that are efficient and cross-platform robust, and the decoder retrieves the embedded latent feature using the indices for reconstruction. Previous SVR-based compression lacks effective mechanism for rate-distortion tradeoffs, where one can only pursue either high reconstruction quality or low transmission bitrate. We propose a Masked Adaptive Codebook learning (M-AdaCode) method that applies masks to the latent feature subspace to balance bitrate and reconstruction quality. A set of semantic-class-dependent basis codebooks are learned, which are weighted combined to generate a rich latent feature for high-quality reconstruction. The combining weights are adaptively derived from each input image, providing fidelity information with additional transmission costs. By masking out unimportant weights in the encoder and recovering them in the decoder, we can trade off reconstruction quality for transmission bits, and the masking rate controls the balance between bitrate and distortion. Experiments over the standard JPEG-AI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our M-AdaCode approach.

Attention-based vision models, such as Vision Transformer (ViT) and its variants, have shown promising performance in various computer vision tasks. However, these emerging architectures suffer from large model sizes and high computational costs, calling for efficient model compression solutions. To date, pruning ViTs has been well studied, while other compression strategies that have been widely applied in CNN compression, e.g., model factorization, is little explored in the context of ViT compression. This paper explores an efficient method for compressing vision transformers to enrich the toolset for obtaining compact attention-based vision models. Based on the new insight on the multi-head attention layer, we develop a highly efficient ViT compression solution, which outperforms the state-of-the-art pruning methods. For compressing DeiT-small and DeiT-base models on ImageNet, our proposed approach can achieve 0.45% and 0.76% higher top-1 accuracy even with fewer parameters. Our finding can also be applied to improve the customization efficiency of text-to-image diffusion models, with much faster training (up to 2.6times speedup) and lower extra storage cost (up to 1927.5times reduction) than the existing works.

DeepSeek-OCR demonstrates that rendered text can be reconstructed with high fidelity from a small number of vision tokens. This finding has sparked excitement about vision-based context compression for language models. But the evaluation stops at reconstruction; whether these representations help language modeling remains untested. We test two assumptions implicit in the optical-compression narrative: that vision-based compression provides unique advantages for text reconstruction from compressed representations, and that DeepSeek-OCR's reconstruction results are evidence that vision-based compression will be useful for language modeling. Comparing their vision encoder against simple alternatives--parameter-free mean pooling and a learned hierarchical encoder--we find that these simple approaches match or surpass vision for reconstruction at matched compression ratios, and outperform it for language modeling--where vision-based compression fails to beat truncation. The excitement around optical context compression outpaces the evidence. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/ivnle/bad-autoencoding

A central goal of visual recognition is to understand objects and scenes from a single image. 2D recognition has witnessed tremendous progress thanks to large-scale learning and general-purpose representations. Comparatively, 3D poses new challenges stemming from occlusions not depicted in the image. Prior works try to overcome these by inferring from multiple views or rely on scarce CAD models and category-specific priors which hinder scaling to novel settings. In this work, we explore single-view 3D reconstruction by learning generalizable representations inspired by advances in self-supervised learning. We introduce a simple framework that operates on 3D points of single objects or whole scenes coupled with category-agnostic large-scale training from diverse RGB-D videos. Our model, Multiview Compressive Coding (MCC), learns to compress the input appearance and geometry to predict the 3D structure by querying a 3D-aware decoder. MCC's generality and efficiency allow it to learn from large-scale and diverse data sources with strong generalization to novel objects imagined by DALLcdotE 2 or captured in-the-wild with an iPhone.

Vision encoders are a critical component of vision-language models, and scaling their capacity effectively improves performance. However, dense scaling increases compute cost and inference latency. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer a compelling alternative, having enabled efficient scaling in LLMs, yet the MoE design space for CLIP-style vision encoders remains underexplored at State-of-the-Art (SOTA) levels. In this work, we systematically study MoE designs for vision encoder scaling and find that fine-grained MoE topologies yield substantial gains over both dense and standard MoE counterparts. We further propose an auxiliary-loss-free balancing variant for better expert utilization, and design a specialized MoE kernel to mitigate inference latency overhead. To enhance video capabilities while preserving image knowledge, we introduce frame-level distillation paired with a novel freezing mechanism. We pretrain a series of Mixture-of-Experts Vision Encoders (MoE-ViE) across a range of sizes, all consistently outperforming their dense counterparts. Our largest model matches the zero-shot performance of a SOTA encoder 1.7x its size at 76% of its latency. When aligned with an LLM, MoE-ViE surpasses all compared encoders on image and video benchmarks, including those with up to 5x more activated parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/moe_vie.

As generative technologies advance, visual content has evolved into a complex mix of natural and AI-generated images, driving the need for more efficient coding techniques that prioritize perceptual quality. Traditional codecs and learned methods struggle to maintain subjective quality at high compression ratios, while existing generative approaches face challenges in visual fidelity and generalization. To this end, we propose a novel generative coding framework leveraging diffusion priors to enhance compression performance at low bitrates. Our approach employs a pre-optimized encoder to generate generalized compressed-domain representations, integrated with the pretrained model's internal features via a lightweight adapter and an attentive fusion module. This framework effectively leverages existing pretrained diffusion models and enables efficient adaptation to different pretrained models for new requirements with minimal retraining costs. We also introduce a distribution renormalization method to further enhance reconstruction fidelity. Extensive experiments show that our method (1) outperforms existing methods in visual fidelity across low bitrates, (2) improves compression performance by up to 79% over H.266/VVC, and (3) offers an efficient solution for AI-generated content while being adaptable to broader content types.

Since the introduction of Vision Transformer (ViT), patchification has long been regarded as a de facto image tokenization approach for plain visual architectures. By compressing the spatial size of images, this approach can effectively shorten the token sequence and reduce the computational cost of ViT-like plain architectures. In this work, we aim to thoroughly examine the information loss caused by this patchification-based compressive encoding paradigm and how it affects visual understanding. We conduct extensive patch size scaling experiments and excitedly observe an intriguing scaling law in patchification: the models can consistently benefit from decreased patch sizes and attain improved predictive performance, until it reaches the minimum patch size of 1x1, i.e., pixel tokenization. This conclusion is broadly applicable across different vision tasks, various input scales, and diverse architectures such as ViT and the recent Mamba models. Moreover, as a by-product, we discover that with smaller patches, task-specific decoder heads become less critical for dense prediction. In the experiments, we successfully scale up the visual sequence to an exceptional length of 50,176 tokens, achieving a competitive test accuracy of 84.6% with a base-sized model on the ImageNet-1k benchmark. We hope this study can provide insights and theoretical foundations for future works of building non-compressive vision models. Code is available at https://github.com/wangf3014/Patch_Scaling.

There has been much interest in deploying deep learning algorithms on low-powered devices, including smartphones, drones, and medical sensors. However, full-scale deep neural networks are often too resource-intensive in terms of energy and storage. As a result, the bulk part of the machine learning operation is therefore often carried out on an edge server, where the data is compressed and transmitted. However, compressing data (such as images) leads to transmitting information irrelevant to the supervised task. Another popular approach is to split the deep network between the device and the server while compressing intermediate features. To date, however, such split computing strategies have barely outperformed the aforementioned naive data compression baselines due to their inefficient approaches to feature compression. This paper adopts ideas from knowledge distillation and neural image compression to compress intermediate feature representations more efficiently. Our supervised compression approach uses a teacher model and a student model with a stochastic bottleneck and learnable prior for entropy coding (Entropic Student). We compare our approach to various neural image and feature compression baselines in three vision tasks and found that it achieves better supervised rate-distortion performance while maintaining smaller end-to-end latency. We furthermore show that the learned feature representations can be tuned to serve multiple downstream tasks.

Video-based point cloud compression (V-PCC) converts the dynamic point cloud data into video sequences using traditional video codecs for efficient encoding. However, this lossy compression scheme introduces artifacts that degrade the color attributes of the data. This paper introduces a framework designed to enhance the color quality in the V-PCC compressed point clouds. We propose the lightweight de-compression Unet (LDC-Unet), a 2D neural network, to optimize the projection maps generated during V-PCC encoding. The optimized 2D maps will then be back-projected to the 3D space to enhance the corresponding point cloud attributes. Additionally, we introduce a transfer learning strategy and develop a customized natural image dataset for the initial training. The model was then fine-tuned using the projection maps of the compressed point clouds. The whole strategy effectively addresses the scarcity of point cloud training data. Our experiments, conducted on the public 8i voxelized full bodies long sequences (8iVSLF) dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in improving the color quality.

Video compression has always been a popular research area, where many traditional and deep video compression methods have been proposed. These methods typically rely on signal prediction theory to enhance compression performance by designing high efficient intra and inter prediction strategies and compressing video frames one by one. In this paper, we propose a novel model-based video compression (MVC) framework that regards scenes as the fundamental units for video sequences. Our proposed MVC directly models the intensity variation of the entire video sequence in one scene, seeking non-redundant representations instead of reducing redundancy through spatio-temporal predictions. To achieve this, we employ implicit neural representation as our basic modeling architecture. To improve the efficiency of video modeling, we first propose context-related spatial positional embedding and frequency domain supervision in spatial context enhancement. For temporal correlation capturing, we design the scene flow constrain mechanism and temporal contrastive loss. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves up to a 20\% bitrate reduction compared to the latest video coding standard H.266 and is more efficient in decoding than existing video coding strategies.

Modern sensors produce increasingly rich streams of high-resolution data. Due to resource constraints, machine learning systems discard the vast majority of this information via resolution reduction. Compressed-domain learning allows models to operate on compact latent representations, allowing higher effective resolution for the same budget. However, existing compression systems are not ideal for compressed learning. Linear transform coding and end-to-end learned compression systems reduce bitrate, but do not uniformly reduce dimensionality; thus, they do not meaningfully increase efficiency. Generative autoencoders reduce dimensionality, but their adversarial or perceptual objectives lead to significant information loss. To address these limitations, we introduce WaLLoC (Wavelet Learned Lossy Compression), a neural codec architecture that combines linear transform coding with nonlinear dimensionality-reducing autoencoders. WaLLoC sandwiches a shallow, asymmetric autoencoder and entropy bottleneck between an invertible wavelet packet transform. Across several key metrics, WaLLoC outperforms the autoencoders used in state-of-the-art latent diffusion models. WaLLoC does not require perceptual or adversarial losses to represent high-frequency detail, providing compatibility with modalities beyond RGB images and stereo audio. WaLLoC's encoder consists almost entirely of linear operations, making it exceptionally efficient and suitable for mobile computing, remote sensing, and learning directly from compressed data. We demonstrate WaLLoC's capability for compressed-domain learning across several tasks, including image classification, colorization, document understanding, and music source separation. Our code, experiments, and pre-trained audio and image codecs are available at https://ut-sysml.org/walloc

Recent Vision Transformer Compression (VTC) works mainly follow a two-stage scheme, where the importance score of each model unit is first evaluated or preset in each submodule, followed by the sparsity score evaluation according to the target sparsity constraint. Such a separate evaluation process induces the gap between importance and sparsity score distributions, thus causing high search costs for VTC. In this work, for the first time, we investigate how to integrate the evaluations of importance and sparsity scores into a single stage, searching the optimal subnets in an efficient manner. Specifically, we present OFB, a cost-efficient approach that simultaneously evaluates both importance and sparsity scores, termed Once for Both (OFB), for VTC. First, a bi-mask scheme is developed by entangling the importance score and the differentiable sparsity score to jointly determine the pruning potential (prunability) of each unit. Such a bi-mask search strategy is further used together with a proposed adaptive one-hot loss to realize the progressive-and-efficient search for the most important subnet. Finally, Progressive Masked Image Modeling (PMIM) is proposed to regularize the feature space to be more representative during the search process, which may be degraded by the dimension reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OFB can achieve superior compression performance over state-of-the-art searching-based and pruning-based methods under various Vision Transformer architectures, meanwhile promoting search efficiency significantly, e.g., costing one GPU search day for the compression of DeiT-S on ImageNet-1K.

Digital cameras digitize scene light into linear raw representations, which the image signal processor (ISP) converts into display-ready outputs. While raw data preserves full sensor information--valuable for editing and vision tasks--formats such as Digital Negative (DNG) require large storage, making them impractical in constrained scenarios. In contrast, JPEG is a widely supported format, offering high compression efficiency and broad compatibility, but it is not well-suited for raw storage. This paper presents RawJPEG Adapter, a lightweight, learnable, and invertible preprocessing pipeline that adapts raw images for standard JPEG compression. Our method applies spatial and optional frequency-domain transforms, with compact parameters stored in the JPEG comment field, enabling accurate raw reconstruction. Experiments across multiple datasets show that our method achieves higher fidelity than direct JPEG storage, supports other codecs, and provides a favorable trade-off between compression ratio and reconstruction accuracy.

The application of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for analyzing images and videos is an exciting and rapidly evolving field. In recent years, we've seen significant growth in high-quality image-text datasets for fine-tuning image understanding, but there is still a lack of comparable datasets for videos. Additionally, many VideoLLMs are extensions of single-image VLMs, which may not efficiently handle the complexities of longer videos. In this study, we introduce a large-scale synthetic dataset created from proprietary models, using carefully designed prompts to tackle a wide range of questions. We also explore a dynamic visual token compression architecture that strikes a balance between computational efficiency and performance. Our proposed achieves state-of-the-art results across various video tasks and shows impressive generalization, setting new baselines in multi-image understanding. Notably, delivers an absolute improvement of 2.7\% over LLaVA-OneVision on VideoMME and 10.7\% on MuirBench. Codes are available at https://github.com/Hon-Wong/ByteVideoLLM

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various multi-modal tasks, but they are often bottlenecked by the limited context window and high computational cost of processing high-resolution image inputs and videos. Vision compression can alleviate this problem by reducing the vision token count. Previous approaches compress vision tokens with external modules and force LLMs to understand the compressed ones, leading to visual information loss. However, the LLMs' understanding paradigm of vision tokens is not fully utilised in the compression learning process. We propose VoCo-LLaMA, the first approach to compress vision tokens using LLMs. By introducing Vision Compression tokens during the vision instruction tuning phase and leveraging attention distillation, our method distill how LLMs comprehend vision tokens into their processing of VoCo tokens. VoCo-LLaMA facilitates effective vision compression and improves the computational efficiency during the inference stage. Specifically, our method achieves minimal performance loss with a compression ratio of 576times, resulting in up to 94.8% fewer FLOPs and 69.6% acceleration in inference time. Furthermore, through continuous training using time-series compressed token sequences of video frames, VoCo-LLaMA demonstrates the ability to understand temporal correlations, outperforming previous methods on popular video question-answering benchmarks. Our approach presents a promising way to unlock the full potential of VLMs' contextual window, enabling more scalable multi-modal applications. The project page, along with the associated code, can be accessed via https://yxxxb.github.io/VoCo-LLaMA-page/{this https URL}.

Existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) struggle with long-form video understanding due to the quadratic computational cost of visual tokens. While recent efficient methods attempt to compress tokens via hard pruning or uniform merging, they operate strictly in the spatial feature domain, where robust structural context and discriminative semantic details are inherently entangled. In this work, we propose WaveZip, a joint signal-frequency-domain framework for efficient video inference. Driven by the insight that temporal redundancy resides in low-pass approximation scales while spatial saliency strongly correlates with high-frequency components, WaveZip leverages Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) to disentangle these signals. Temporally, it employs 1D DWT to analyze query-frame relevance, and the resulting high-frequency coefficients are further gated by inter-frame differences, with both signals jointly driving the dynamic allocation of a precise frame-level token budget. Spatially, a 2D DWT decomposes features into low-frequency approximations and high-frequency detail components, where the high-frequency coefficients are modulated within query-salient regions to regulate spatial reconstruction. Importantly, WaveZip requires no task-specific training and can be seamlessly integrated into off-the-shelf LVLMs to boost inference efficiency. Extensive experiments on long video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that WaveZip retains 99.6% of the full performance under an extreme 10x compression ratio, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

With the increasing consumption of 3D displays and virtual reality, multi-view video has become a promising format. However, its high resolution and multi-camera shooting result in a substantial increase in data volume, making storage and transmission a challenging task. To tackle these difficulties, we propose an implicit-explicit integrated representation for multi-view video compression. Specifically, we first use the explicit representation-based 2D video codec to encode one of the source views. Subsequently, we propose employing the implicit neural representation (INR)-based codec to encode the remaining views. The implicit codec takes the time and view index of multi-view video as coordinate inputs and generates the corresponding implicit reconstruction frames.To enhance the compressibility, we introduce a multi-level feature grid embedding and a fully convolutional architecture into the implicit codec. These components facilitate coordinate-feature and feature-RGB mapping, respectively. To further enhance the reconstruction quality from the INR codec, we leverage the high-quality reconstructed frames from the explicit codec to achieve inter-view compensation. Finally, the compensated results are fused with the implicit reconstructions from the INR to obtain the final reconstructed frames. Our proposed framework combines the strengths of both implicit neural representation and explicit 2D codec. Extensive experiments conducted on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework can achieve comparable or even superior performance to the latest multi-view video compression standard MIV and other INR-based schemes in terms of view compression and scene modeling.

We introduce Perception Encoder (PE), a state-of-the-art encoder for image and video understanding trained via simple vision-language learning. Traditionally, vision encoders have relied on a variety of pretraining objectives, each tailored to specific downstream tasks such as classification, captioning, or localization. Surprisingly, after scaling our carefully tuned image pretraining recipe and refining with our robust video data engine, we find that contrastive vision-language training alone can produce strong, general embeddings for all of these downstream tasks. There is only one caveat: these embeddings are hidden within the intermediate layers of the network. To draw them out, we introduce two alignment methods, language alignment for multimodal language modeling, and spatial alignment for dense prediction. Together with the core contrastive checkpoint, our PE family of models achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of tasks, including zero-shot image and video classification and retrieval; document, image, and video Q&A; and spatial tasks such as detection, depth estimation, and tracking. To foster further research, we are releasing our models, code, and a novel dataset of synthetically and human-annotated videos.

LiDAR point clouds are fundamental to various applications, yet the extreme sparsity of high-precision geometric details hinders efficient context modeling, thereby limiting the compression speed and performance of existing methods. To address this challenge, we propose a compact representation for efficient predictive lossless coding. Our framework comprises two lightweight modules. First, the Geometry Re-Densification Module iteratively densifies encoded sparse geometry, extracts features at a dense scale, and then sparsifies the features for predictive coding. This module avoids costly computation on highly sparse details while maintaining a lightweight prediction head. Second, the Cross-scale Feature Propagation Module leverages occupancy cues from multiple resolution levels to guide hierarchical feature propagation, enabling information sharing across scales and reducing redundant feature extraction. Additionally, we introduce an integer-only inference pipeline to enable bit-exact cross-platform consistency, which avoids the entropy-coding collapse observed in existing neural compression methods and further accelerates coding. Experiments demonstrate competitive compression performance at real-time speed. Code will be released upon acceptance. Code is available at https://github.com/pengpeng-yu/FastPCC.

Recent advances in generative compression methods have demonstrated remarkable progress in enhancing the perceptual quality of compressed data, especially in scenarios with low bitrates. However, their efficacy and applicability to achieve extreme compression ratios (<0.05 bpp) remain constrained. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective coding framework by introducing vector quantization (VQ)--based generative models into the image compression domain. The main insight is that the codebook learned by the VQGAN model yields a strong expressive capacity, facilitating efficient compression of continuous information in the latent space while maintaining reconstruction quality. Specifically, an image can be represented as VQ-indices by finding the nearest codeword, which can be encoded using lossless compression methods into bitstreams. We propose clustering a pre-trained large-scale codebook into smaller codebooks through the K-means algorithm, yielding variable bitrates and different levels of reconstruction quality within the coding framework. Furthermore, we introduce a transformer to predict lost indices and restore images in unstable environments. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art codecs in terms of perceptual quality-oriented metrics and human perception at extremely low bitrates (le 0.04 bpp). Remarkably, even with the loss of up to 20% of indices, the images can be effectively restored with minimal perceptual loss.

Current large vision-language models (VLMs) often encounter challenges such as insufficient capabilities of a single visual component and excessively long visual tokens. These issues can limit the model's effectiveness in accurately interpreting complex visual information and over-lengthy contextual information. Addressing these challenges is crucial for enhancing the performance and applicability of VLMs. This paper proposes the use of ensemble experts technique to synergizes the capabilities of individual visual encoders, including those skilled in image-text matching, OCR, image segmentation, etc. This technique introduces a fusion network to unify the processing of outputs from different visual experts, while bridging the gap between image encoders and pre-trained LLMs. In addition, we explore different positional encoding schemes to alleviate the waste of positional encoding caused by lengthy image feature sequences, effectively addressing the issue of position overflow and length limitations. For instance, in our implementation, this technique significantly reduces the positional occupancy in models like SAM, from a substantial 4096 to a more efficient and manageable 64 or even down to 1. Experimental results demonstrate that VLMs with multiple experts exhibit consistently superior performance over isolated visual encoders and mark a significant performance boost as more experts are integrated. We have open-sourced the training code used in this report. All of these resources can be found on our project website.

Video Language Models (VideoLMs) empower AI systems to understand temporal dynamics in videos. To fit to the maximum context window constraint, current methods use keyframe sampling which can miss both macro-level events and micro-level details due to the sparse temporal coverage. Furthermore, processing full images and their tokens for each frame incurs substantial computational overhead. To address these limitations, we propose to leverage video codec primitives (specifically motion vectors and residuals) which natively encode video redundancy and sparsity without requiring expensive full-image encoding for most frames. To this end, we introduce lightweight transformer-based encoders that aggregate codec primitives and align their representations with image encoder embeddings through a pre-training strategy that accelerates convergence during end-to-end fine-tuning. Our approach reduces the time-to-first-token by up to 86% and token usage by up to 93% compared to standard VideoLMs. Moreover, by varying the keyframe and codec primitive densities we are able to maintain or exceed performance on 14 diverse video understanding benchmarks spanning general question answering, temporal reasoning, long-form understanding, and spatial scene understanding.

Vision transformers (ViTs) have gained popularity recently. Even without customized image operators such as convolutions, ViTs can yield competitive performance when properly trained on massive data. However, the computational overhead of ViTs remains prohibitive, due to stacking multi-head self-attention modules and else. Compared to the vast literature and prevailing success in compressing convolutional neural networks, the study of Vision Transformer compression has also just emerged, and existing works focused on one or two aspects of compression. This paper proposes a unified ViT compression framework that seamlessly assembles three effective techniques: pruning, layer skipping, and knowledge distillation. We formulate a budget-constrained, end-to-end optimization framework, targeting jointly learning model weights, layer-wise pruning ratios/masks, and skip configurations, under a distillation loss. The optimization problem is then solved using the primal-dual algorithm. Experiments are conducted with several ViT variants, e.g. DeiT and T2T-ViT backbones on the ImageNet dataset, and our approach consistently outperforms recent competitors. For example, DeiT-Tiny can be trimmed down to 50\% of the original FLOPs almost without losing accuracy. Codes are available online:~https://github.com/VITA-Group/UVC.

Recent work in image and video generation has been adopting the autoregressive LLM architecture due to its generality and potentially easy integration into multi-modal systems. The crux of applying autoregressive training in language generation to visual generation is discretization -- representing continuous data like images and videos as discrete tokens. Common methods of discretizing images and videos include modeling raw pixel values, which are prohibitively lengthy, or vector quantization, which requires convoluted pre-hoc training. In this work, we propose to directly model images and videos as compressed files saved on computers via canonical codecs (e.g., JPEG, AVC/H.264). Using the default Llama architecture without any vision-specific modifications, we pretrain JPEG-LM from scratch to generate images (and AVC-LM to generate videos as a proof of concept), by directly outputting compressed file bytes in JPEG and AVC formats. Evaluation of image generation shows that this simple and straightforward approach is more effective than pixel-based modeling and sophisticated vector quantization baselines (on which our method yields a 31% reduction in FID). Our analysis shows that JPEG-LM has an especial advantage over vector quantization models in generating long-tail visual elements. Overall, we show that using canonical codec representations can help lower the barriers between language generation and visual generation, facilitating future research on multi-modal language/image/video LLMs.

We describe an end-to-end trainable model for image compression based on variational autoencoders. The model incorporates a hyperprior to effectively capture spatial dependencies in the latent representation. This hyperprior relates to side information, a concept universal to virtually all modern image codecs, but largely unexplored in image compression using artificial neural networks (ANNs). Unlike existing autoencoder compression methods, our model trains a complex prior jointly with the underlying autoencoder. We demonstrate that this model leads to state-of-the-art image compression when measuring visual quality using the popular MS-SSIM index, and yields rate-distortion performance surpassing published ANN-based methods when evaluated using a more traditional metric based on squared error (PSNR). Furthermore, we provide a qualitative comparison of models trained for different distortion metrics.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a range of multimodal tasks; however, their practical deployment is often constrained by high computational costs and prolonged inference times. Since the vision modality typically carries more information than the text modality, compressing visual prompts offers a promising solution to alleviate these challenges. Existing approaches predominantly focus on refining model architectures or directly reducing the number of visual tokens. However, these methods often compromise inference performance due to a lack of consideration for the unique spatial and temporal characteristics of visual data. In this work, we propose a token compression paradigm that operates on both spatial and temporal dimensions. Our approach includes a learning-free, plug-and-play compression pipeline that can be seamlessly integrated into most Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) frameworks. By leveraging this method, we enhance the model inference capability while simultaneously reducing its computational cost. Experimental results on the Video-QA task demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showcasing significant improvements in efficiency without sacrificing performance.

Contemporary lossy image and video coding standards rely on transform coding, the process through which pixels are mapped to an alternative representation to facilitate efficient data compression. Despite impressive performance of end-to-end optimized compression with deep neural networks, the high computational and space demands of these models has prevented them from superseding the relatively simple transform coding found in conventional video codecs. In this study, we propose learned transforms and entropy coding that may either serve as (non)linear drop-in replacements, or enhancements for linear transforms in existing codecs. These transforms can be multi-rate, allowing a single model to operate along the entire rate-distortion curve. To demonstrate the utility of our framework, we augmented the DCT with learned quantization matrices and adaptive entropy coding to compress intra-frame AV1 block prediction residuals. We report substantial BD-rate and perceptual quality improvements over more complex nonlinear transforms at a fraction of the computational cost.

Convolutional neural networks are now seeing widespread use in a variety of fields, including image classification, facial and object recognition, medical imaging analysis, and many more. In addition, there are applications such as physics-informed simulators in which accurate forecasts in real time with a minimal lag are required. The present neural network designs include millions of parameters, which makes it difficult to install such complex models on devices that have limited memory. Compression techniques might be able to resolve these issues by decreasing the size of CNN models that are created by reducing the number of parameters that contribute to the complexity of the models. We propose a compressed tensor format of convolutional layer, a priori, before the training of the neural network. 3-way kernels or 2-way kernels in convolutional layers are replaced by one-way fiters. The overfitting phenomena will be reduced also. The time needed to make predictions or time required for training using the original Convolutional Neural Networks model would be cut significantly if there were fewer parameters to deal with. In this paper we present a method of a priori compressing convolutional neural networks for finite element (FE) predictions of physical data. Afterwards we validate our a priori compressed models on physical data from a FE model solving a 2D wave equation. We show that the proposed convolutinal compression technique achieves equivalent performance as classical convolutional layers with fewer trainable parameters and lower memory footprint.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been extended to understand both images and videos. Visual token compression is leveraged to reduce the considerable token length of visual inputs. To meet the needs of different tasks, existing high-performance models usually process images and videos separately with different token compression strategies, limiting the capabilities of combining images and videos. To this end, we extend each image into a "static" video and introduce a unified token compression strategy called Progressive Visual Token Compression (PVC), where the tokens of each frame are progressively encoded and adaptively compressed to supplement the information not extracted from previous frames. Video tokens are efficiently compressed with exploiting the inherent temporal redundancy. Images are repeated as static videos, and the spatial details can be gradually supplemented in multiple frames. PVC unifies the token compressing of images and videos. With a limited number of tokens per frame (64 tokens by default), spatial details and temporal changes can still be preserved. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across various video understanding benchmarks, including long video tasks and fine-grained short video tasks. Meanwhile, our unified token compression strategy incurs no performance loss on image benchmarks, particularly in detail-sensitive tasks.

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.

Media compression standards have reached a plateau in terms of the rate-distortion-complexity trade-off, limiting the ability to offload expensive AI perception to the cloud in applications like robotics, wearables, and remote sensing. DNN-based codecs improve compression efficiency, but at a cost: they cannot easily adapt to large changes in available bitrate, and real-time encoding requires expensive, power-hungry GPUs that prohibit use on low-cost or resource-constrained platforms. To address these limitations, we propose a novel autoencoding framework (FRAPPE) that uses the Full input to predict the Residual output via a Projection Pursuit Encoder. FRAPPE's encoding objective naturally sorts latent channels by importance, allowing zero-overhead variable-rate coding. Unlike RNN-based learned codecs, whose encoder consumes the previous reconstruction's residual, or RVQ-style codecs, whose codebooks must be applied sequentially, FRAPPE's analysis path is an embarrassingly parallel DAG of independent input projections. Using FRAPPE, we build a variable-rate RGB image codec (FRAPPE-Image), and evaluate its rate-distortion-complexity trade-off against standard image codecs. At high compression ratios (approx. 0.1 bpp) FRAPPE-Image provides higher perceptual quality than AVIF with 47 times faster encoding, making it capable of real-time 1080p, 30fps CPU-only encoding. Our code and pre-trained models are available: https://github.com/UT-SysML/FRAPPE .

Despite extensive progress on image generation, common deep generative model architectures are not easily applied to lossless compression. For example, VAEs suffer from a compression cost overhead due to their latent variables. This overhead can only be partially eliminated with elaborate schemes such as bits-back coding, often resulting in poor single-sample compression rates. To overcome such problems, we establish a new class of tractable lossless compression models that permit efficient encoding and decoding: Probabilistic Circuits (PCs). These are a class of neural networks involving |p| computational units that support efficient marginalization over arbitrary subsets of the D feature dimensions, enabling efficient arithmetic coding. We derive efficient encoding and decoding schemes that both have time complexity O (log(D) cdot |p|), where a naive scheme would have linear costs in D and |p|, making the approach highly scalable. Empirically, our PC-based (de)compression algorithm runs 5-40 times faster than neural compression algorithms that achieve similar bitrates. By scaling up the traditional PC structure learning pipeline, we achieve state-of-the-art results on image datasets such as MNIST. Furthermore, PCs can be naturally integrated with existing neural compression algorithms to improve the performance of these base models on natural image datasets. Our results highlight the potential impact that non-standard learning architectures may have on neural data compression.

Existing codecs are designed to eliminate intrinsic redundancies to create a compact representation for compression. However, strong external priors from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have not been explicitly explored in video compression. Herein, we introduce a unified paradigm for Cross-Modality Video Coding (CMVC), which is a pioneering approach to explore multimodality representation and video generative models in video coding. Specifically, on the encoder side, we disentangle a video into spatial content and motion components, which are subsequently transformed into distinct modalities to achieve very compact representation by leveraging MLLMs. During decoding, previously encoded components and video generation models are leveraged to create multiple encoding-decoding modes that optimize video reconstruction quality for specific decoding requirements, including Text-Text-to-Video (TT2V) mode to ensure high-quality semantic information and Image-Text-to-Video (IT2V) mode to achieve superb perceptual consistency. In addition, we propose an efficient frame interpolation model for IT2V mode via Low-Rank Adaption (LoRA) tuning to guarantee perceptual quality, which allows the generated motion cues to behave smoothly. Experiments on benchmarks indicate that TT2V achieves effective semantic reconstruction, while IT2V exhibits competitive perceptual consistency. These results highlight potential directions for future research in video coding.

Multimodal retrieval still leans on embedding-based models like CLIP for fast vector search over pre-computed image embeddings. Yet, unlike text retrieval, where joint-encoder rerankers are standard, comparable vision--language rerankers are largely absent. We find that seminal joint encoders such as BLIP are severely bottlenecked by an expensive visual feature-extraction stage, preventing practical deployment at scale. Motivated by this bottleneck, we introduce EDJE, an Efficient Discriminative Joint Encoder that precomputes vision tokens offline and compresses them via a lightweight attention-based adapter, so online inference runs only a compact joint encoder over a small set of visual tokens plus the text. EDJE preserves strong retrieval performance while drastically reducing storage and online compute, enabling high-throughput inference. Specifically, EDJE processes 50k image--text pairs/second while requiring 49kB of disk storage per image, matching prior art on Flickr (zero-shot) and COCO (fine-tuned) retrieval. The implementation and checkpoints will be made publicly available shortly.

The advent of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has advanced the video-based tasks, such as video captioning and video understanding. Some previous research indicates that taking texts in videos as input can further improve the performance of video understanding. As a type of indispensable information in short videos or movies, subtitles can assist LVLMs to better understand videos. Most existing methods for video subtitle extraction are based on a multi-stage framework, handling each frame independently. They can hardly exploit the temporal information of videos. Although some LVLMs exhibit the robust OCR capability, predicting accurate timestamps for subtitle texts is still challenging. In this paper, we propose an End-to-end Video Subtitle Extraction method, called EVE, which consists of three modules: a vision encoder, an adapter module, and a large language model. To effectively compress the visual tokens from the vision encoder, we propose a novel adapter InterleavedVT to interleave two modalities. It contains a visual compressor and a textual region compressor. The proposed InterleavedVT exploits both the merits of average pooling and Q-Former in token compression. Taking the temporal information of videos into account, we introduce a sliding-window mechanism in the textual region compressor. To benchmark the video subtitle extraction task, we propose a large dataset ViSa including 2.5M videos. Extensive experiments on ViSa demonstrate that the proposed EVE can outperform existing open-sourced tools and LVLMs.

Most existing extreme compression methods fail to achieve an optimal rate-distortion-perception trade-off, as they typically prioritize perceptual fidelity and visual realism over pixel-level accuracy. Consequently, the resulting reconstructions often deviate noticeably from the originals. Ultra-low bitrate image compression is therefore crucial-not only for producing extremely compact representations but also for ensuring that reconstructed images remain semantically coherent and faithful to the source at the pixel level. To this end, we propose SPRDiff, a diffusion-based compression method that fully leverages both semantic and pixel representations, thereby enhancing reconstruction fidelity under ultra-low bitrate constraints. Specifically, we develop a triple-encoder architecture that utilizes high-fidelity features from the pretrained distortion-oriented and semantic-oriented encoders to compensate for the limited representations extracted by the frozen VAE encoder, thereby improving latent compression and entropy modeling. To further enhance the reconstruction fidelity of diffusion models, we introduce a distortion-aware reconstruction module with dual feature extraction. This module not only generates a coarse reconstruction that preserves the main structures, but also provides practical and accurate semantic- and pixel-level conditional signals to guide the diffusion model. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in the rate-distortion-perception tradeoff at extremely low bitrates (below 0.03 bpp), effectively preserving both perceptual quality and pixel-wise fidelity in the reconstructed images. We will release the source code and trained models at https://github.com/cshw2021/SPRDiff.

Vision encoders typically generate a large number of visual tokens, providing information-rich representations but significantly increasing computational demands. This raises the question of whether all generated tokens are equally valuable or if some of them can be discarded to reduce computational costs without compromising quality. In this paper, we introduce a new method for determining feature utility based on the idea that less valuable features can be reconstructed from more valuable ones. We implement this concept by integrating an autoencoder with a Gumbel-Softmax selection mechanism, that allows identifying and retaining only the most informative visual tokens. To validate our approach, we compared the performance of the LLaVA-NeXT model, using features selected by our method with randomly selected features. We found that on OCR-based tasks, more than 50% of the visual context can be removed with minimal performance loss, whereas randomly discarding the same proportion of features significantly affects the model capabilities. Furthermore, in general-domain tasks, even randomly retaining only 30% of tokens achieves performance comparable to using the full set of visual tokens. Our results highlight a promising direction towards adaptive and efficient multimodal pruning that facilitates scalable and low-overhead inference without compromising performance.

Vision Transformers (ViT) have marked a paradigm shift in computer vision, outperforming state-of-the-art models across diverse tasks. However, their practical deployment is hampered by high computational and memory demands. This study addresses the challenge by evaluating four primary model compression techniques: quantization, low-rank approximation, knowledge distillation, and pruning. We methodically analyze and compare the efficacy of these techniques and their combinations in optimizing ViTs for resource-constrained environments. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that these methods facilitate a balanced compromise between model accuracy and computational efficiency, paving the way for wider application in edge computing devices.

Prior research on deep video compression (DVC) for machine tasks typically necessitates training a unique codec for each specific task, mandating a dedicated decoder per task. In contrast, traditional video codecs employ a flexible encoder controller, enabling the adaptation of a single codec to different tasks through mechanisms like mode prediction. Drawing inspiration from this, we introduce an innovative encoder controller for deep video compression for machines. This controller features a mode prediction and a Group of Pictures (GoP) selection module. Our approach centralizes control at the encoding stage, allowing for adaptable encoder adjustments across different tasks, such as detection and tracking, while maintaining compatibility with a standard pre-trained DVC decoder. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our method is applicable across multiple tasks with various existing pre-trained DVCs. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous DVC by about 25% bitrate for different tasks, with only one pre-trained decoder.

Long video understanding is a complex task that requires both spatial detail and temporal awareness. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) obtain frame-level understanding capabilities through multi-frame input, they suffer from information loss due to the sparse sampling strategy. In contrast, Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) capture temporal relationships within visual features but are limited by the scarcity of high-quality video-text datasets. To transfer long video understanding capabilities to VLMs with minimal data and computational cost, we propose Lightweight Video Compression (LVC), a novel method featuring the Query-Attention Video Compression mechanism, which effectively tackles the sparse sampling problem in VLMs. By training only the alignment layer with 10k short video-text pairs, LVC significantly enhances the temporal reasoning abilities of VLMs. Extensive experiments show that LVC provides consistent performance improvements across various models, including the InternVL2 series and Phi-3.5-Vision. Notably, the InternVL2-40B-LVC achieves scores of 68.2 and 65.9 on the long video understanding benchmarks MLVU and Video-MME, respectively, with relative improvements of 14.6% and 7.7%. The enhanced models and code will be publicly available soon.

Recent advancements in vision-language models have enhanced performance by increasing the length of visual tokens, making them much longer than text tokens and significantly raising computational costs. However, we observe that the visual tokens generated by popular vision encoders, such as CLIP and SigLIP, contain significant redundancy. To address this, we introduce VisionZip, a simple yet effective method that selects a set of informative tokens for input to the language model, reducing visual token redundancy and improving efficiency while maintaining model performance. The proposed VisionZip can be widely applied to image and video understanding tasks and is well-suited for multi-turn dialogues in real-world scenarios, where previous methods tend to underperform. Experimental results show that VisionZip outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by at least 5% performance gains across nearly all settings. Moreover, our method significantly enhances model inference speed, improving the prefilling time by 8x and enabling the LLaVA-Next 13B model to infer faster than the LLaVA-Next 7B model while achieving better results. Furthermore, we analyze the causes of this redundancy and encourage the community to focus on extracting better visual features rather than merely increasing token length. Our code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/VisionZip .

Learning a robust video Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is essential for reducing video redundancy and facilitating efficient video generation. Directly applying image VAEs to individual frames in isolation can result in temporal inconsistencies and suboptimal compression rates due to a lack of temporal compression. Existing Video VAEs have begun to address temporal compression; however, they often suffer from inadequate reconstruction performance. In this paper, we present a novel and powerful video autoencoder capable of high-fidelity video encoding. First, we observe that entangling spatial and temporal compression by merely extending the image VAE to a 3D VAE can introduce motion blur and detail distortion artifacts. Thus, we propose temporal-aware spatial compression to better encode and decode the spatial information. Additionally, we integrate a lightweight motion compression model for further temporal compression. Second, we propose to leverage the textual information inherent in text-to-video datasets and incorporate text guidance into our model. This significantly enhances reconstruction quality, particularly in terms of detail preservation and temporal stability. Third, we further improve the versatility of our model through joint training on both images and videos, which not only enhances reconstruction quality but also enables the model to perform both image and video autoencoding. Extensive evaluations against strong recent baselines demonstrate the superior performance of our method. The project website can be found at~https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/{https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/}.

Video streaming analytics is a crucial workload for vision-language model serving, but the high cost of multimodal inference limits scalability. Prior systems reduce inference cost by exploiting temporal and spatial redundancy in video streams, but they target either the vision transformer (ViT) or the LLM with a limited view, leaving end-to-end opportunities untapped. Moreover, existing methods incur significant overhead to identify redundancy, either through offline profiling and training or costly online computation, making them ill-suited for dynamic real-time streams. We present CodecSight, a codec-guided streaming video analytics system, built on a key observation that video codecs already extract the temporal and spatial structure of each stream as a byproduct of compression. CodecSight treats this codec metadata as a low-cost runtime signal to unify optimization across video decoding, visual processing, and LLM prefilling, with transmission reduction as an inherent benefit of operating directly on compressed bitstreams. This drives codec-guided patch pruning before ViT encoding and selective key-value cache refresh during LLM prefilling, both of which are fully online and do not require offline training. Experiments show that CodecSight achieves an improvement in throughput of up to 3times, and a reduction of up to 87% in GPU compute over state-of-the-art baselines, maintaining competitive accuracy with only 0sim8% F1 drop.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) typically replace the predefined image placeholder token (<image>) in textual instructions with visual features from an image encoder, forming the input to a backbone Large Language Model (LLM). However, the large number of vision tokens significantly increases the context length, leading to high computational overhead and inference latency. While previous efforts mitigate this by selecting only important visual features or leveraging learnable queries to reduce token count, they often compromise performance or introduce substantial extra costs. In response, we propose Fourier-VLM, a simple yet efficient method that compresses visual representations in the frequency domain. Our approach is motivated by the observation that vision features output from the vision encoder exhibit concentrated energy in low-frequency components. Leveraging this, we apply a low-pass filter to the vision features using a two-dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Notably, the DCT is efficiently computed via the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operator with a time complexity of O(nlog n), minimizing the extra computational cost while introducing no additional parameters. Extensive experiments across various image-based benchmarks demonstrate that Fourier-VLM achieves competitive performance with strong generalizability across both LLaVA and Qwen-VL architectures. Crucially, it reduce inference FLOPs by up to 83.8% and boots generation speed by 31.2% compared to LLaVA-v1.5, highlighting the superior efficiency and practicality.

The transformer extends its success from the language to the vision domain. Because of the stacked self-attention and cross-attention blocks, the acceleration deployment of vision transformer on GPU hardware is challenging and also rarely studied. This paper thoroughly designs a compression scheme to maximally utilize the GPU-friendly 2:4 fine-grained structured sparsity and quantization. Specially, an original large model with dense weight parameters is first pruned into a sparse one by 2:4 structured pruning, which considers the GPU's acceleration of 2:4 structured sparse pattern with FP16 data type, then the floating-point sparse model is further quantized into a fixed-point one by sparse-distillation-aware quantization aware training, which considers GPU can provide an extra speedup of 2:4 sparse calculation with integer tensors. A mixed-strategy knowledge distillation is used during the pruning and quantization process. The proposed compression scheme is flexible to support supervised and unsupervised learning styles. Experiment results show GPUSQ-ViT scheme achieves state-of-the-art compression by reducing vision transformer models 6.4-12.7 times on model size and 30.3-62 times on FLOPs with negligible accuracy degradation on ImageNet classification, COCO detection and ADE20K segmentation benchmarking tasks. Moreover, GPUSQ-ViT can boost actual deployment performance by 1.39-1.79 times and 3.22-3.43 times of latency and throughput on A100 GPU, and 1.57-1.69 times and 2.11-2.51 times improvement of latency and throughput on AGX Orin.

Neural fields, also known as implicit neural representations (INRs), have shown a remarkable capability of representing, generating, and manipulating various data types, allowing for continuous data reconstruction at a low memory footprint. Though promising, INRs applied to video compression still need to improve their rate-distortion performance by a large margin, and require a huge number of parameters and long training iterations to capture high-frequency details, limiting their wider applicability. Resolving this problem remains a quite challenging task, which would make INRs more accessible in compression tasks. We take a step towards resolving these shortcomings by introducing neural representations for videos NeRV++, an enhanced implicit neural video representation, as more straightforward yet effective enhancement over the original NeRV decoder architecture, featuring separable conv2d residual blocks (SCRBs) that sandwiches the upsampling block (UB), and a bilinear interpolation skip layer for improved feature representation. NeRV++ allows videos to be directly represented as a function approximated by a neural network, and significantly enhance the representation capacity beyond current INR-based video codecs. We evaluate our method on UVG, MCL JVC, and Bunny datasets, achieving competitive results for video compression with INRs. This achievement narrows the gap to autoencoder-based video coding, marking a significant stride in INR-based video compression research.

As the key component in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the ability of the visual encoder greatly affects MLLM's understanding on diverse image content. Although some large-scale pretrained vision encoders such as vision encoders in CLIP and DINOv2 have brought promising performance, we found that there is still no single vision encoder that can dominate various image content understanding, e.g., the CLIP vision encoder leads to outstanding results on general image understanding but poor performance on document or chart content. To alleviate the bias of CLIP vision encoder, we first delve into the inherent behavior of different pre-trained vision encoders and then propose the MoVA, a powerful and novel MLLM, adaptively routing and fusing task-specific vision experts with a coarse-to-fine mechanism. In the coarse-grained stage, we design a context-aware expert routing strategy to dynamically select the most suitable vision experts according to the user instruction, input image, and expertise of vision experts. This benefits from the powerful model function understanding ability of the large language model (LLM) equipped with expert-routing low-rank adaptation (LoRA). In the fine-grained stage, we elaborately conduct the mixture-of-vision-expert adapter (MoV-Adapter) to extract and fuse task-specific knowledge from various experts. This coarse-to-fine paradigm effectively leverages representations from experts based on multimodal context and model expertise, further enhancing the generalization ability. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Without any bells and whistles, MoVA can achieve significant performance gains over current state-of-the-art methods in a wide range of challenging multimodal benchmarks. Codes and models will be available at https://github.com/TempleX98/MoVA.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend LLMs with visual understanding through a three-stage pipeline: multimodal preprocessing, vision encoding, and LLM inference. While these stages enhance capability, they introduce significant system bottlenecks. First, multimodal preprocessing-especially video decoding-often dominates Time-to-First-Token (TTFT). Most systems rely on CPU-based decoding, which severely limits throughput, while existing GPU-based approaches prioritize throughput-oriented parallelism and fail to meet the latency-sensitive requirements of MLLM inference. Second, the vision encoder is a standalone, compute-intensive stage that produces visual embeddings and cannot be co-batched with LLM prefill or decoding. This heterogeneity forces inter-stage blocking and increases token-generation latency. Even when deployed on separate GPUs, these stages underutilize available compute and memory resources, reducing overall utilization and constraining system throughput. To address these challenges, we present FlashCodec and UnifiedServe, two complementary designs that jointly optimize the end-to-end MLLM pipeline. FlashCodec accelerates the multimodal preprocessing stage through collaborative multi-GPU video decoding, reducing decoding latency while preserving high throughput. UnifiedServe optimizes the vision-to-text and inference stages using a logically decoupled their execution to eliminate inter-stage blocking, yet physically sharing GPU resources to maximize GPU system utilization. By carefully orchestrating execution across stages and minimizing interference, UnifiedServe Together, our proposed framework forms an end-to-end optimized stack that can serve up to 3.0times more requests or enforce 1.5times tighter SLOs, while achieving up to 4.4times higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art systems.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit impressive multi-modal capabilities but suffer from prohibitive computational and memory demands, due to their long visual token sequences and massive parameter sizes. To address these issues, recent works have proposed training-free compression methods. However, existing efforts often suffer from three major limitations: (1) Current approaches do not decompose techniques into comparable modules, hindering fair evaluation across spatial and temporal redundancy. (2) Evaluation confined to simple single-turn tasks, failing to reflect performance in realistic scenarios. (3) Isolated use of individual compression techniques, without exploring their joint potential. To overcome these gaps, we introduce LLMC+, a comprehensive VLM compression benchmark with a versatile, plug-and-play toolkit. LLMC+ supports over 20 algorithms across five representative VLM families and enables systematic study of token-level and model-level compression. Our benchmark reveals that: (1) Spatial and temporal redundancies demand distinct technical strategies. (2) Token reduction methods degrade significantly in multi-turn dialogue and detail-sensitive tasks. (3) Combining token and model compression achieves extreme compression with minimal performance loss. We believe LLMC+ will facilitate fair evaluation and inspire future research in efficient VLM. Our code is available at https://github.com/ModelTC/LightCompress.

This paper presents an end-to-end neural mapping method for camera localization, dubbed NeuMap, encoding a whole scene into a grid of latent codes, with which a Transformer-based auto-decoder regresses 3D coordinates of query pixels. State-of-the-art feature matching methods require each scene to be stored as a 3D point cloud with per-point features, consuming several gigabytes of storage per scene. While compression is possible, performance drops significantly at high compression rates. Conversely, coordinate regression methods achieve high compression by storing scene information in a neural network but suffer from reduced robustness. NeuMap combines the advantages of both approaches by utilizing 1) learnable latent codes for efficient scene representation and 2) a scene-agnostic Transformer-based auto-decoder to infer coordinates for query pixels. This scene-agnostic network design learns robust matching priors from large-scale data and enables rapid optimization of codes for new scenes while keeping the network weights fixed. Extensive evaluations on five benchmarks show that NeuMap significantly outperforms other coordinate regression methods and achieves comparable performance to feature matching methods while requiring a much smaller scene representation size. For example, NeuMap achieves 39.1% accuracy in the Aachen night benchmark with only 6MB of data, whereas alternative methods require 100MB or several gigabytes and fail completely under high compression settings. The codes are available at https://github.com/Tangshitao/NeuMap

In this paper, we contend that a natural objective of representation learning is to compress and transform the distribution of the data, say sets of tokens, towards a low-dimensional Gaussian mixture supported on incoherent subspaces. The goodness of such a representation can be evaluated by a principled measure, called sparse rate reduction, that simultaneously maximizes the intrinsic information gain and extrinsic sparsity of the learned representation. From this perspective, popular deep network architectures, including transformers, can be viewed as realizing iterative schemes to optimize this measure. Particularly, we derive a transformer block from alternating optimization on parts of this objective: the multi-head self-attention operator compresses the representation by implementing an approximate gradient descent step on the coding rate of the features, and the subsequent multi-layer perceptron sparsifies the features. This leads to a family of white-box transformer-like deep network architectures, named CRATE, which are mathematically fully interpretable. We show, by way of a novel connection between denoising and compression, that the inverse to the aforementioned compressive encoding can be realized by the same class of CRATE architectures. Thus, the so-derived white-box architectures are universal to both encoders and decoders. Experiments show that these networks, despite their simplicity, indeed learn to compress and sparsify representations of large-scale real-world image and text datasets, and achieve performance very close to highly engineered transformer-based models: ViT, MAE, DINO, BERT, and GPT2. We believe the proposed computational framework demonstrates great potential in bridging the gap between theory and practice of deep learning, from a unified perspective of data compression. Code is available at: https://ma-lab-berkeley.github.io/CRATE .

Resource-constrained hardware, such as edge devices or cell phones, often rely on cloud servers to provide the required computational resources for inference in deep vision models. However, transferring image and video data from an edge or mobile device to a cloud server requires coding to deal with network constraints. The use of standardized codecs, such as JPEG or H.264, is prevalent and required to ensure interoperability. This paper aims to examine the implications of employing standardized codecs within deep vision pipelines. We find that using JPEG and H.264 coding significantly deteriorates the accuracy across a broad range of vision tasks and models. For instance, strong compression rates reduce semantic segmentation accuracy by more than 80% in mIoU. In contrast to previous findings, our analysis extends beyond image and action classification to localization and dense prediction tasks, thus providing a more comprehensive perspective.

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.

Vision-language models (VLMs) process large numbers of visual tokens, resulting in substantial inference latency and memory overhead. This has motivated extensive research on visual token compression. While training-free strategies rely on heuristic metrics and suffer significant performance degradation under high compression ratios, many training-based methods introduce external compression modules that force the VLM backbone to adapt, incurring substantial retraining cost and compromising VLMs' priors. Effective visual token compression hinges on strong information encoding, a capability already present in pretrained VLMs but underutilized by existing approaches. Motivated by this, we propose VisCo, a training-efficient self-compression framework that reuses the pretrained VLM itself as an intrinsic compressor. VisCo is a parameter-sharing autoencoder that compresses visual information using a small set of memory tokens and transfers hierarchical information from encoding to decoding. Experiments show that VisCo surpasses prior methods across all evaluated compression ratios, with larger gains under more aggressive compression, and remains stable even in the extreme single-token setting. Moreover, when combined with the original visual tokens, the learned memory tokens can even improve the base model, suggesting that VisCo captures complementary representations beyond compression.

While recent neural codecs achieve strong performance at low bitrates when optimized for perceptual quality, their effectiveness deteriorates significantly under ultra-low bitrate conditions. To mitigate this, generative compression methods leveraging semantic priors from pretrained models have emerged as a promising paradigm. However, existing approaches are fundamentally constrained by a tradeoff between semantic faithfulness and perceptual realism. Methods based on explicit representations preserve content structure but often lack fine-grained textures, whereas implicit methods can synthesize visually plausible details at the cost of semantic drift. In this work, we propose a unified framework that bridges this gap by coherently integrating explicit and implicit representations in a training-free manner. Specifically, We condition a diffusion model on explicit high-level semantics while employing reverse-channel coding to implicitly convey fine-grained details. Moreover, we introduce a plug-in encoder that enables flexible control of the distortion-perception tradeoff by modulating the implicit information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art rate-perception performance, outperforming existing methods and surpassing DiffC by 29.92%, 19.33%, and 20.89% in DISTS BD-Rate on the Kodak, DIV2K, and CLIC2020 datasets, respectively.

In robotics systems, vast amounts of visual data are easily captured at high resolution using low-cost, low-power hardware. Yet, limited bandwidth and on-device compute resources prevent full utilization when transmitted via conventional codecs like JPEG/MPEG. Newer codecs, like AV1/AVIF, improve the rate-distortion trade-off, but demand far more resources for encoding, impractical without custom ASICs. Recent asymmetric autoencoders deliver high quality under extreme power and bandwidth constraints, but add prohibitive decoding cost and use bespoke formats that ignore decades of infrastructure built around standards like JPEG. To address these limitations, we introduce a compression framework for cloud robotics based on a Sensor Embedded Autoencoder paired with a One-Time Transcode for Efficient Reconstruction (SEAOTTER). Because the sensor, cloud, and consumer stages face very different power and bandwidth budgets, SEAOTTER combines the compactness of a learned latent with the broad usability of a standard JPEG file. Since naive transcoding degrades performance, we propose a learnable JPEG color and quantization transform that enables increased accuracy for global, dense, and vision-language-based perception. Using SEAOTTER, we train both general-purpose and task-aware transcoding pipelines for a pre-trained, frozen encoder. At a compression ratio of 200:1 and compared to AVIF, we observe 7 times faster encoding, 3.5 times faster decoding, and +8% ImageNet top-1 accuracy, while retaining compatibility with JPEG infrastructure. Our code is available at https://github.com/UT-SysML/seaotter .

Recent research has shown a strong theoretical connection between variational autoencoders (VAEs) and the rate-distortion theory. Motivated by this, we consider the problem of lossy image compression from the perspective of generative modeling. Starting with ResNet VAEs, which are originally designed for data (image) distribution modeling, we redesign their latent variable model using a quantization-aware posterior and prior, enabling easy quantization and entropy coding at test time. Along with improved neural network architecture, we present a powerful and efficient model that outperforms previous methods on natural image lossy compression. Our model compresses images in a coarse-to-fine fashion and supports parallel encoding and decoding, leading to fast execution on GPUs. Code is available at https://github.com/duanzhiihao/lossy-vae.

Image compression for machines calls for a unified codec that serves multiple downstream vision tasks. Existing approaches either adopt task-specific end-to-end designs, raising parameter and deployment overhead, or rely on transfer-based adaptations that remain externally attached and heuristic task design. A key limitation shared by both lines of work is their largely static computation pattern, which applies similar transformations across tokens despite the fact that different image regions exhibit markedly different semantic importance and complexity for machine perception. We propose MoECodec, a token-aware image compression framework that supports multiple downstream tasks within a single model. MoECodec replaces the FFN layers in transformer-based compression model token-wise Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), enabling dynamic, token-level computation conditioned on the input content and task objective. To make MoE effective in compression model, we introduce a stable routing strategy that combines expert-choice routing with spatial total variation regularization to encourage spatially coherent assignments, and we propose a lightweight expert architecture, Group Shuffle MLP (GShMLP), to control parameter growth. Extensive experiments show consistent improvement against baselines on both conventional image reconstruction and machine tasks.

The emerging large models have achieved notable progress in the fields of natural language processing and computer vision. However, large models for neural video coding are still unexplored. In this paper, we try to explore how to build a large neural video coding model. Based on a small baseline model, we gradually scale up the model sizes of its different coding parts, including the motion encoder-decoder, motion entropy model, contextual encoder-decoder, contextual entropy model, and temporal context mining module, and analyze the influence of model sizes on video compression performance. Then, we explore to use different architectures, including CNN, mixed CNN-Transformer, and Transformer architectures, to implement the neural video coding model and analyze the influence of model architectures on video compression performance. Based on our exploration results, we design the first neural video coding model with more than 1 billion parameters -- NVC-1B. Experimental results show that our proposed large model achieves a significant video compression performance improvement over the small baseline model, and represents the state-of-the-art compression efficiency. We anticipate large models may bring up the video coding technologies to the next level.

Deep learning model inference on embedded devices is challenging due to the limited availability of computation resources. A popular alternative is to perform model inference on the cloud, which requires transmitting images from the embedded device to the cloud. Image compression techniques are commonly employed in such cloud-based architectures to reduce transmission latency over low bandwidth networks. This work proposes an end-to-end image compression framework that learns domain-specific features to achieve higher compression ratios than standard HEVC/JPEG compression techniques while maintaining accuracy on downstream tasks (e.g., recognition). Our framework does not require fine-tuning of the downstream task, which allows us to drop-in any off-the-shelf downstream task model without retraining. We choose faces as an application domain due to the ready availability of datasets and off-the-shelf recognition models as representative downstream tasks. We present a novel Identity Preserving Reconstruction (IPR) loss function which achieves Bits-Per-Pixel (BPP) values that are ~38% and ~42% of CRF-23 HEVC compression for LFW (low-resolution) and CelebA-HQ (high-resolution) datasets, respectively, while maintaining parity in recognition accuracy. The superior compression ratio is achieved as the model learns to retain the domain-specific features (e.g., facial features) while sacrificing details in the background. Furthermore, images reconstructed by our proposed compression model are robust to changes in downstream model architectures. We show at-par recognition performance on the LFW dataset with an unseen recognition model while retaining a lower BPP value of ~38% of CRF-23 HEVC compression.

Reducing computational complexity remains a critical challenge for the widespread adoption of learning-based image compression techniques. In this work, we propose TreeNet, a novel low-complexity image compression model that leverages a binary tree-structured encoder-decoder architecture to achieve efficient representation and reconstruction. We employ attentional feature fusion mechanism to effectively integrate features from multiple branches. We evaluate TreeNet on three widely used benchmark datasets and compare its performance against competing methods including JPEG AI, a recent standard in learning-based image compression. At low bitrates, TreeNet achieves an average improvement of 4.83% in BD-rate over JPEG AI, while reducing model complexity by 87.82%. Furthermore, we conduct extensive ablation studies to investigate the influence of various latent representations within TreeNet, offering deeper insights into the factors contributing to reconstruction.

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.

The incorporation of high-resolution visual input equips multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with enhanced visual perception capabilities for real-world tasks. However, most existing high-resolution MLLMs rely on a cropping-based approach to process images, which leads to fragmented visual encoding and a sharp increase in redundant tokens. To tackle these issues, we propose the FALCON model. FALCON introduces a novel visual register technique to simultaneously: 1) Eliminate redundant tokens at the stage of visual encoding. To directly address the visual redundancy present in the output of vision encoder, we propose a Register-based Representation Compacting (ReCompact) mechanism. This mechanism introduces a set of learnable visual registers designed to adaptively aggregate essential information while discarding redundancy. It enables the encoder to produce a more compact visual representation with a minimal number of output tokens, thus eliminating the need for an additional compression module. 2) Ensure continuity in visual encoding. To address the potential encoding errors caused by fragmented visual inputs, we develop a Register Interactive Attention (ReAtten) module. This module facilitates effective and efficient information exchange across sub-images by enabling interactions between visual registers. It ensures the continuity of visual semantics throughout the encoding. We conduct comprehensive experiments with FALCON on high-resolution benchmarks across a wide range of scenarios. FALCON demonstrates superior performance with a remarkable 9-fold reduction in visual tokens.

We introduce a modality-agnostic neural compression algorithm based on a functional view of data and parameterised as an Implicit Neural Representation (INR). Bridging the gap between latent coding and sparsity, we obtain compact latent representations non-linearly mapped to a soft gating mechanism. This allows the specialisation of a shared INR network to each data item through subnetwork selection. After obtaining a dataset of such latent representations, we directly optimise the rate/distortion trade-off in a modality-agnostic space using neural compression. Variational Compression of Implicit Neural Representations (VC-INR) shows improved performance given the same representational capacity pre quantisation while also outperforming previous quantisation schemes used for other INR techniques. Our experiments demonstrate strong results over a large set of diverse modalities using the same algorithm without any modality-specific inductive biases. We show results on images, climate data, 3D shapes and scenes as well as audio and video, introducing VC-INR as the first INR-based method to outperform codecs as well-known and diverse as JPEG 2000, MP3 and AVC/HEVC on their respective modalities.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain bottlenecked by massive computational footprints, precluding their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. While efforts to compress LVLMs focus heavily on vision token reduction or smaller language models, the vision encoder is largely overlooked, typically deployed as a monolithic, computationally heavy feature extractor. Moreover, there is no previous effort that designs a vision encoder for LVLMs directly optimized for on-device latency. In this paper, we present UltraViT, a vision encoder for LVLMs, explicitly designed and optimized for on-device performance. Specifically, by taking into account real on-device latencies, we systematically design a pyramidal architecture that strategically integrates and adapts heterogeneous spatial mixers at the macro-block level. Furthermore, to pre-train UltraViT, we propose a novel two-stage generative pre-training strategy: cultivating rich spatial features via dense distillation, followed by direct generative supervision from a capacity-mixed frozen LLM. Compared to standard contrastive and SSL, we show that our pre-training is much more effective for achieving high-level semantic grounding for UltraViT needed for the subsequent generative multimodal alignment of LVLM training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our on-device latency-informed design combined with our tailored training strategy establishes a new state-of-the-art for efficient LVLM encoding, significantly outperforming existing encoder-centric baselines while operating on-device at nearly 1.7xthe speed.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have achieved huge success in effectively capturing and representing 3D objects and scenes. However, to establish a ubiquitous presence in everyday media formats, such as images and videos, we need to fulfill three key objectives: 1. fast encoding and decoding time, 2. compact model sizes, and 3. high-quality renderings. Despite recent advancements, a comprehensive algorithm that adequately addresses all objectives has yet to be fully realized. In this work, we present CodecNeRF, a neural codec for NeRF representations, consisting of an encoder and decoder architecture that can generate a NeRF representation in a single forward pass. Furthermore, inspired by the recent parameter-efficient finetuning approaches, we propose a finetuning method to efficiently adapt the generated NeRF representations to a new test instance, leading to high-quality image renderings and compact code sizes. The proposed CodecNeRF, a newly suggested encoding-decoding-finetuning pipeline for NeRF, achieved unprecedented compression performance of more than 100x and remarkable reduction in encoding time while maintaining (or improving) the image quality on widely used 3D object datasets.

Learned image compression (LIC) methods have recently outperformed traditional codecs such as VVC in rate-distortion performance. However, their large models and high computational costs have limited their practical adoption. In this paper, we first construct a high-capacity teacher model by integrating Swin-Transformer V2-based attention modules, additional residual blocks, and expanded latent channels, thus achieving enhanced compression performance. Building on this foundation, we propose a Feature and Entropy-based Distillation Strategy (FEDS) that transfers key knowledge from the teacher to a lightweight student model. Specifically, we align intermediate feature representations and emphasize the most informative latent channels through an entropy-based loss. A staged training scheme refines this transfer in three phases: feature alignment, channel-level distillation, and final fine-tuning. Our student model nearly matches the teacher across Kodak (1.24\% BD-Rate increase), Tecnick (1.17\%), and CLIC (0.55\%) while cutting parameters by about 63\% and accelerating encoding/decoding by around 73\%. Moreover, ablation studies indicate that FEDS generalizes effectively to transformer-based networks. The experimental results demonstrate our approach strikes a compelling balance among compression performance, speed, and model parameters, making it well-suited for real-time or resource-limited scenarios.

The cost of deploying vision transformers increasingly represents a barrier to wider industrial adoption. Existing compression requires additional end-to-end fine-tuning or incurs a significant drawback to runtime, thus making them ill-suited for online inference. We introduce the Visual Word Tokenizer (VWT), a training-free method for reducing energy costs while retaining performance and runtime. The VWT groups patches (visual subwords) that are frequently used into visual words while infrequent ones remain intact. To do so, intra-image or inter-image statistics are leveraged to identify similar visual concepts for compression. Experimentally, we demonstrate a reduction in wattage of up to 19% with only a 20% increase in runtime at most. Comparative approaches of 8-bit quantization and token merging achieve a lower or similar energy efficiency but exact a higher toll on runtime (up to 2times or more). Our results indicate that VWTs are well-suited for efficient online inference with a marginal compromise on performance.

Visual encoders are fundamental components in vision-language models (VLMs), each showcasing unique strengths derived from various pre-trained visual foundation models. To leverage the various capabilities of these encoders, recent studies incorporate multiple encoders within a single VLM, leading to a considerable increase in computational cost. In this paper, we present Mixture-of-Visual-Encoder Knowledge Distillation (MoVE-KD), a novel framework that distills the unique proficiencies of multiple vision encoders into a single, efficient encoder model. Specifically, to mitigate conflicts and retain the unique characteristics of each teacher encoder, we employ low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and mixture-of-experts (MoEs) to selectively activate specialized knowledge based on input features, enhancing both adaptability and efficiency. To regularize the KD process and enhance performance, we propose an attention-based distillation strategy that adaptively weighs the different visual encoders and emphasizes valuable visual tokens, reducing the burden of replicating comprehensive but distinct features from multiple teachers. Comprehensive experiments on popular VLMs, such as LLaVA and LLaVA-NeXT, validate the effectiveness of our method. The code will be released.

Image codecs are typically optimized to trade-off bitrate \vs distortion metrics. At low bitrates, this leads to compression artefacts which are easily perceptible, even when training with perceptual or adversarial losses. To improve image quality and remove dependency on the bitrate, we propose to decode with iterative diffusion models. We condition the decoding process on a vector-quantized image representation, as well as a global image description to provide additional context. We dub our model PerCo for 'perceptual compression', and compare it to state-of-the-art codecs at rates from 0.1 down to 0.003 bits per pixel. The latter rate is more than an order of magnitude smaller than those considered in most prior work, compressing a 512x768 Kodak image with less than 153 bytes. Despite this ultra-low bitrate, our approach maintains the ability to reconstruct realistic images. We find that our model leads to reconstructions with state-of-the-art visual quality as measured by FID and KID. As predicted by rate-distortion-perception theory, visual quality is less dependent on the bitrate than previous methods.

The framework of dominant learned video compression methods is usually composed of motion prediction modules as well as motion vector and residual image compression modules, suffering from its complex structure and error propagation problem. Approaches have been proposed to reduce the complexity by replacing motion prediction modules with implicit flow networks. Error propagation aware training strategy is also proposed to alleviate incremental reconstruction errors from previously decoded frames. Although these methods have brought some improvement, little attention has been paid to the framework itself. Inspired by the success of learned image compression through simplifying the framework with a single deep neural network, it is natural to expect a better performance in video compression via a simple yet appropriate framework. Therefore, we propose a framework to directly compress raw-pixel frames (rather than residual images), where no extra motion prediction module is required. Instead, an entropy model is used to estimate the spatiotemporal redundancy in a latent space rather than pixel level, which significantly reduces the complexity of the framework. Specifically, the whole framework is a compression module, consisting of a unified auto-encoder which produces identically distributed latents for all frames, and a spatiotemporal entropy estimation model to minimize the entropy of these latents. Experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under the metric of multiscale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) and achieves competitive results under the metric of PSNR.

Supported by powerful generative models, low-bitrate learned image compression (LIC) models utilizing perceptual metrics have become feasible. Some of the most advanced models achieve high compression rates and superior perceptual quality by using image captions as sub-information. This paper demonstrates that using a large multi-modal model (LMM), it is possible to generate captions and compress them within a single model. We also propose a novel semantic-perceptual-oriented fine-tuning method applicable to any LIC network, resulting in a 41.58\% improvement in LPIPS BD-rate compared to existing methods. Our implementation and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/tokkiwa/ImageTextCoding.

Conventional cameras capture image irradiance on a sensor and convert it to RGB images using an image signal processor (ISP). The images can then be used for photography or visual computing tasks in a variety of applications, such as public safety surveillance and autonomous driving. One can argue that since RAW images contain all the captured information, the conversion of RAW to RGB using an ISP is not necessary for visual computing. In this paper, we propose a novel ρ-Vision framework to perform high-level semantic understanding and low-level compression using RAW images without the ISP subsystem used for decades. Considering the scarcity of available RAW image datasets, we first develop an unpaired CycleR2R network based on unsupervised CycleGAN to train modular unrolled ISP and inverse ISP (invISP) models using unpaired RAW and RGB images. We can then flexibly generate simulated RAW images (simRAW) using any existing RGB image dataset and finetune different models originally trained for the RGB domain to process real-world camera RAW images. We demonstrate object detection and image compression capabilities in RAW-domain using RAW-domain YOLOv3 and RAW image compressor (RIC) on snapshots from various cameras. Quantitative results reveal that RAW-domain task inference provides better detection accuracy and compression compared to RGB-domain processing. Furthermore, the proposed ho-Vision generalizes across various camera sensors and different task-specific models. Additional advantages of the proposed ρ-Vision that eliminates the ISP are the potential reductions in computations and processing times.

Running AI models on smart edge devices can unlock versatile user experiences, but presents challenges due to limited compute and the need to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. This requires a vision encoder with small size but powerful and versatile representations. We present our method, Efficient Universal Perception Encoder (EUPE), which offers both inference efficiency and universally good representations for diverse downstream tasks. We achieve this by distilling from multiple domain-expert foundation vision encoders. Unlike previous agglomerative methods that directly scale down from multiple teachers to an efficient encoder, we demonstrate the importance of first scaling up to a large proxy teacher and then scaling down from this single teacher. Experiments show that EUPE achieves on-par or better performance than individual domain experts of the same size on diverse task domains and also outperforms previous agglomerative encoders. We will release the full family of EUPE models and the code to foster future research.

Recently, 3D Gaussian Spatting (3DGS) has gained widespread attention in Novel View Synthesis (NVS) due to the remarkable real-time rendering performance. However, the substantial cost of storage and transmission of vanilla 3DGS hinders its further application (hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes for a single scene). Motivated by the achievements of prediction in video compression, we introduce the prediction technique into the anchor-based Gaussian representation to effectively reduce the bit rate. Specifically, we propose a spatial condition-based prediction module to utilize the grid-captured scene information for prediction, with a residual compensation strategy designed to learn the missing fine-grained information. Besides, to further compress the residual, we propose an instance-aware hyper prior, developing a structure-aware and instance-aware entropy model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our prediction-based compression framework and each technical component. Even compared with SOTA compression method, our framework still achieves a bit rate savings of 24.42 percent. Code is to be released!

Lossy image compression aims to represent images in as few bits as possible while maintaining fidelity to the original. Theoretical results indicate that optimizing distortion metrics such as PSNR or MS-SSIM necessarily leads to a discrepancy in the statistics of original images from those of reconstructions, in particular at low bitrates, often manifested by the blurring of the compressed images. Previous work has leveraged adversarial discriminators to improve statistical fidelity. Yet these binary discriminators adopted from generative modeling tasks may not be ideal for image compression. In this paper, we introduce a non-binary discriminator that is conditioned on quantized local image representations obtained via VQ-VAE autoencoders. Our evaluations on the CLIC2020, DIV2K and Kodak datasets show that our discriminator is more effective for jointly optimizing distortion (e.g., PSNR) and statistical fidelity (e.g., FID) than the state-of-the-art HiFiC model. On the CLIC2020 test set, we obtain the same FID as HiFiC with 30-40% fewer bits.

The advent of real-time large multimodal models (LMMs) like GPT-4o has sparked considerable interest in efficient LMMs. LMM frameworks typically encode visual inputs into vision tokens (continuous representations) and integrate them and textual instructions into the context of large language models (LLMs), where large-scale parameters and numerous context tokens (predominantly vision tokens) result in substantial computational overhead. Previous efforts towards efficient LMMs always focus on replacing the LLM backbone with smaller models, while neglecting the crucial issue of token quantity. In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-Mini, an efficient LMM with minimal vision tokens. To achieve a high compression ratio of vision tokens while preserving visual information, we first analyze how LMMs understand vision tokens and find that most vision tokens only play a crucial role in the early layers of LLM backbone, where they mainly fuse visual information into text tokens. Building on this finding, LLaVA-Mini introduces modality pre-fusion to fuse visual information into text tokens in advance, thereby facilitating the extreme compression of vision tokens fed to LLM backbone into one token. LLaVA-Mini is a unified large multimodal model that can support the understanding of images, high-resolution images, and videos in an efficient manner. Experiments across 11 image-based and 7 video-based benchmarks demonstrate that LLaVA-Mini outperforms LLaVA-v1.5 with just 1 vision token instead of 576. Efficiency analyses reveal that LLaVA-Mini can reduce FLOPs by 77%, deliver low-latency responses within 40 milliseconds, and process over 10,000 frames of video on the GPU hardware with 24GB of memory.

Entropy coding is widely used in typical learned image compression (LIC) that converts latents into a compact bitstream. However, entropy coding is typically sequential and becomes the coding latency bottleneck. To overcome it, we present Entropy-Coding Free Learned Image Compression (EF-LIC), a multi-rate framework that generates compact representation by removing statistical and correlation redundancy with low coding latency. First, we introduce unconstrained vector quantization and prove that its index distribution approaches the maximum-entropy bound, yielding minimal statistical redundancy. Second, we propose a context-conditioned autoregressive transform that directly reparameterizes the latents to reduce inter-dependency. Theoretical analysis shows that EF-LIC can remove correlation redundancy as effectively as typical LIC with entropy coding, leading to comparable compression performance. Experiments show EF-LIC achieves up to 67.86% bitrate reduction over MS-ILLM on Kodak with LPIPS. Ablation studies further show EF-LIC matches the compression performance of its entropy-coding based variant while achieving over 3times faster encoding and 5times faster decoding.

Implicit neural representations store videos as neural networks and have performed well for various vision tasks such as video compression and denoising. With frame index or positional index as input, implicit representations (NeRV, E-NeRV, \etc) reconstruct video from fixed and content-agnostic embeddings. Such embedding largely limits the regression capacity and internal generalization for video interpolation. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Neural Representation for Videos (HNeRV), where a learnable encoder generates content-adaptive embeddings, which act as the decoder input. Besides the input embedding, we introduce HNeRV blocks, which ensure model parameters are evenly distributed across the entire network, such that higher layers (layers near the output) can have more capacity to store high-resolution content and video details. With content-adaptive embeddings and re-designed architecture, HNeRV outperforms implicit methods in video regression tasks for both reconstruction quality (+4.7 PSNR) and convergence speed (16times faster), and shows better internal generalization. As a simple and efficient video representation, HNeRV also shows decoding advantages for speed, flexibility, and deployment, compared to traditional codecs~(H.264, H.265) and learning-based compression methods. Finally, we explore the effectiveness of HNeRV on downstream tasks such as video compression and video inpainting. We provide project page at https://haochen-rye.github.io/HNeRV, and Code at https://github.com/haochen-rye/HNeRV

Neural image compression methods have seen increasingly strong performance in recent years. However, they suffer orders of magnitude higher computational complexity compared to traditional codecs, which stands in the way of real-world deployment. This paper takes a step forward in closing this gap in decoding complexity by adopting shallow or even linear decoding transforms. To compensate for the resulting drop in compression performance, we exploit the often asymmetrical computation budget between encoding and decoding, by adopting more powerful encoder networks and iterative encoding. We theoretically formalize the intuition behind, and our experimental results establish a new frontier in the trade-off between rate-distortion and decoding complexity for neural image compression. Specifically, we achieve rate-distortion performance competitive with the established mean-scale hyperprior architecture of Minnen et al. (2018), while reducing the overall decoding complexity by 80 %, or over 90 % for the synthesis transform alone. Our code can be found at https://github.com/mandt-lab/shallow-ntc.

We present DeepCABAC, a novel context-adaptive binary arithmetic coder for compressing deep neural networks. It quantizes each weight parameter by minimizing a weighted rate-distortion function, which implicitly takes the impact of quantization on to the accuracy of the network into account. Subsequently, it compresses the quantized values into a bitstream representation with minimal redundancies. We show that DeepCABAC is able to reach very high compression ratios across a wide set of different network architectures and datasets. For instance, we are able to compress by x63.6 the VGG16 ImageNet model with no loss of accuracy, thus being able to represent the entire network with merely 8.7MB.

Modern sensors generate rich, high-fidelity data, yet applications operating on wearable or remote sensing devices remain constrained by bandwidth and power budgets. Standardized codecs such as JPEG and MPEG achieve efficient trade-offs between bitrate and perceptual quality but are designed for human perception, limiting their applicability to machine-perception tasks and non-traditional modalities such as spatial audio arrays, hyperspectral images, and 3D medical images. General-purpose compression schemes based on scalar quantization or resolution reduction are broadly applicable but fail to exploit inherent signal redundancies, resulting in suboptimal rate-distortion performance. Recent generative neural codecs, or tokenizers, model complex signal dependencies but are often over-parameterized, data-hungry, and modality-specific, making them impractical for resource-constrained environments. We introduce a Lightweight, Versatile, and Asymmetric neural codec architecture (LiVeAction), that addresses these limitations through two key ideas. (1) To reduce the complexity of the encoder to meet the resource constraints of the execution environments, we impose an FFT-like structure and reduce the overall size and depth of the neural-network-based analysis transform. (2) To allow arbitrary signal modalities and simplify training, we replace adversarial and perceptual losses with a variance-based rate penalty. Our design produces codecs that deliver superior rate-distortion performance compared to state-of-the-art generative tokenizers, while remaining practical for deployment on low-power sensors. We release our code, experiments, and python library at https://github.com/UT-SysML/liveaction .

"Compression Tells Intelligence", is supported by research in artificial intelligence, particularly concerning (multimodal) large language models (LLMs/MLLMs), where compression efficiency often correlates with improved model performance and capabilities. For compression, classical visual coding based on traditional information theory has developed over decades, achieving great success with numerous international industrial standards widely applied in multimedia (e.g., image/video) systems. Except that, the recent emergingvisual token technology of generative multi-modal large models also shares a similar fundamental objective like visual coding: maximizing semantic information fidelity during the representation learning while minimizing computational cost. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of two dominant technique families first -- Visual Coding and Vision Token Technology -- then we further unify them from the aspect of optimization, discussing the essence of compression efficiency and model performance trade-off behind. Next, based on the proposed unified formulation bridging visual coding andvisual token technology, we synthesize bidirectional insights of themselves and forecast the next-gen visual codec and token techniques. Last but not least, we experimentally show a large potential of the task-oriented token developments in the more practical tasks like multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), AI-generated content (AIGC), and embodied AI, as well as shedding light on the future possibility of standardizing a general token technology like the traditional codecs (e.g., H.264/265) with high efficiency for a wide range of intelligent tasks in a unified and effective manner.

Feature coding for machines (FCM) is a lossy compression paradigm for split-inference. The transmitter encodes the outputs of the first part of a neural network before sending them to the receiver for completing the inference. Practical FCM methods ``sandwich'' a traditional codec between pre- and post-processing neural networks, called wrappers, to make features easier to compress using video codecs. Since traditional codecs are non-differentiable, the wrappers are trained using a proxy codec, which is later replaced by a standard codec after training. These codecs perform rate-distortion optimization (RDO) based on the sum of squared errors (SSE). Because the RDO does not consider the post-processing wrapper, the inner codec can invest bits in preserving information that the post-processing later discards. In this paper, we modify the bit-allocation in the inner codec via a wrapper-aware weighted SSE metric. To make wrapper-aware RDO (WA-RDO) practical for FCM, we propose: 1) temporal reuse of weights across a group of pictures and 2) fixed, architecture- and task-dependent weights trained offline. Under MPEG test conditions, our methods implemented on HEVC match the VVC-based FCM state-of-the-art, effectively bridging a codec generation gap with minimal runtime overhead relative to SSE-RDO HEVC.

We introduce LLaVA-OneVision-2 (LLaVA-OV-2), the most capable vision-language model in the LLaVA-OneVision series to date, achieving superior performance across a broad range of multimodal benchmarks. The model builds on a native OneVision-Encoder and incorporates Windowed Attention for efficient local computation while maintaining native resolution. Its key advance is codec-stream tokenization: it treats compressed video as a continuous bit-cost stream, where bit-cost dynamics determine adaptive temporal groups, and motion-residual cues select salient spatial evidence into compact visual canvases. This allocation concentrates a limited token budget on event-bearing content, enabling more stable long-video token compression than fixed groups of pictures. A shared 3D RoPE further places codec canvases, sampled frames, and images in a unified spatiotemporal coordinate system. Furthermore, we build the LLaVA-OV-2 data and training stack around large-scale open supervision: approximately 8M re-captioned video samples for pretraining, a 4M-sample spatial corpus for fine-tuning. We also introduce JumpScore, a temporal-localization benchmark targeting fine-grained grounding in high-frequency, densely repeated motion, a regime underrepresented by existing video evaluations. A standout capability of LLaVA-OV-2 is its unified perception across video understanding, temporal grounding, spatial grounding, and manipulation-trace reasoning. On JumpScore, LLaVA-OneVision-2-8B reaches 74.9 JumpScore mAP, surpassing Qwen3-VL-8B (30.1) by +44.8 points; under matched visual-token budgets on the same benchmark, codec-stream inputs improve temporal grounding over frame sampling by +9.7 points. Across standard benchmarks, LLaVA-OneVision-2-8B further outperforms Qwen3-VL-8B by +4.3 average points on video tasks, +5.3 on spatial tasks, and +15.6 average J&F on tracking tasks.

The exponential growth of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has driven advancements in cross-modal reasoning but at significant computational costs. In this work, we focus on visual language models. We highlight the redundancy and inefficiency in current vision encoders, and seek to construct an adaptive compression method for multimodal data. In this work, we characterize a panoply of visual token selection and merging approaches through both benchmarking and qualitative analysis. In particular, we demonstrate that simple cluster-level token aggregation outperforms prior state-of-the-art works in token selection and merging, including merging at the vision encoder level and attention-based approaches. We underline the redundancy in current vision encoders, and shed light on several puzzling trends regarding principles of visual token selection through cross-modal attention visualizations. This work is a first effort towards more effective encoding and processing of high-dimensional data, and paves the way for more scalable and sustainable multimodal systems.

OpenAI's CLIP, released in early 2021, have long been the go-to choice of vision encoder for building multimodal foundation models. Although recent alternatives such as SigLIP have begun to challenge this status quo, to our knowledge none are fully open: their training data remains proprietary and/or their training recipes are not released. This paper fills this gap with OpenVision, a fully-open, cost-effective family of vision encoders that match or surpass the performance of OpenAI's CLIP when integrated into multimodal frameworks like LLaVA. OpenVision builds on existing works -- e.g., CLIPS for training framework and Recap-DataComp-1B for training data -- while revealing multiple key insights in enhancing encoder quality and showcasing practical benefits in advancing multimodal models. By releasing vision encoders spanning from 5.9M to 632.1M parameters, OpenVision offers practitioners a flexible trade-off between capacity and efficiency in building multimodal models: larger models deliver enhanced multimodal performance, while smaller versions enable lightweight, edge-ready multimodal deployments.

Commercial video generation models have exhibited realistic, high-fidelity results but are still restricted to limited access. One crucial obstacle for large-scale applications is the expensive training and inference cost. In this paper, we argue that videos contain much more redundant information than images, thus can be encoded by very few motion latents based on a content image. Towards this goal, we design an image-conditioned VAE to encode a video to an extremely compressed motion latent space. This magic Reducio charm enables 64x reduction of latents compared to a common 2D VAE, without sacrificing the quality. Training diffusion models on such a compact representation easily allows for generating 1K resolution videos. We then adopt a two-stage video generation paradigm, which performs text-to-image and text-image-to-video sequentially. Extensive experiments show that our Reducio-DiT achieves strong performance in evaluation, though trained with limited GPU resources. More importantly, our method significantly boost the efficiency of video LDMs both in training and inference. We train Reducio-DiT in around 3.2K training hours in total and generate a 16-frame 1024*1024 video clip within 15.5 seconds on a single A100 GPU. Code released at https://github.com/microsoft/Reducio-VAE .

Learned Image Compression (LIC) has achieved dramatic progress regarding objective and subjective metrics. MSE-based models aim to improve objective metrics while generative models are leveraged to improve visual quality measured by subjective metrics. However, they all suffer from blurring or deformation at low bit rates, especially at below 0.2bpp. Besides, deformation on human faces and text is unacceptable for visual quality assessment, and the problem becomes more prominent on small faces and text. To solve this problem, we combine the advantage of MSE-based models and generative models by utilizing region of interest (ROI). We propose Hierarchical-ROI (H-ROI), to split images into several foreground regions and one background region to improve the reconstruction of regions containing faces, text, and complex textures. Further, we propose adaptive quantization by non-linear mapping within the channel dimension to constrain the bit rate while maintaining the visual quality. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve better visual quality on small faces and text with lower bit rates, e.g., 0.7X bits of HiFiC and 0.5X bits of BPG.

While significant advancements have been made in compressed representations for text embeddings in large language models (LLMs), the compression of visual tokens in large multi-modal models (LMMs) has remained a largely overlooked area. In this work, we present the study on the analysis of redundancy concerning visual tokens and efficient training within these models. Our initial experiments show that eliminating up to 70% of visual tokens at the testing stage by simply average pooling only leads to a minimal 3% reduction in visual question answering accuracy on the GQA benchmark, indicating significant redundancy in visual context. Addressing this, we introduce Visual Context Compressor, which reduces the number of visual tokens during training to enhance training efficiency without sacrificing performance. To minimize information loss caused by the compression on visual tokens while maintaining training efficiency, we develop LLaVolta as a lite training scheme. LLaVolta incorporates stage-wise visual context compression to progressively compress the visual tokens from heavily to lightly, and finally no compression at the end of training, yielding no loss of information when testing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances the performance of MLLMs in both image-language and video-language understanding, while also significantly cutting training costs. Code is available at https://github.com/Beckschen/LLaVolta

Document understanding and GUI interaction are among the highest-value applications of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet they impose exceptionally heavy computational burden: fine-grained text and small UI elements demand high-resolution inputs that produce tens of thousands of visual tokens. We observe that this cost is largely wasteful -- across document and GUI benchmarks, only 22--71\% of image patches are pixel-unique, the rest being exact duplicates of another patch in the same image. We propose PixelPrune, which exploits this pixel-level redundancy through predictive-coding-based compression, pruning redundant patches before the Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder. Because it operates in pixel space prior to any neural computation, PixelPrune accelerates both the ViT encoder and the downstream LLM, covering the full inference pipeline. The method is training-free, requires no learnable parameters, and supports pixel-lossless compression (τ{=}0) as well as controlled lossy compression (τ{>}0). Experiments across three model scales and document and GUI benchmarks show that PixelPrune maintains competitive task accuracy while delivering up to 4.2times inference speedup and 1.9times training acceleration. Code is available at https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/PixelPrune.

We introduce a practical real-time neural video codec (NVC) designed to deliver high compression ratio, low latency and broad versatility. In practice, the coding speed of NVCs depends on 1) computational costs, and 2) non-computational operational costs, such as memory I/O and the number of function calls. While most efficient NVCs prioritize reducing computational cost, we identify operational cost as the primary bottleneck to achieving higher coding speed. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a set of efficiency-driven design improvements focused on minimizing operational costs. Specifically, we employ implicit temporal modeling to eliminate complex explicit motion modules, and use single low-resolution latent representations rather than progressive downsampling. These innovations significantly accelerate NVC without sacrificing compression quality. Additionally, we implement model integerization for consistent cross-device coding and a module-bank-based rate control scheme to improve practical adaptability. Experiments show our proposed DCVC-RT achieves an impressive average encoding/decoding speed at 125.2/112.8 fps (frames per second) for 1080p video, while saving an average of 21% in bitrate compared to H.266/VTM. The code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC.

We present SceneTok, a novel tokenizer for encoding view sets of scenes into a compressed and diffusable set of unstructured tokens. Existing approaches for 3D scene representation and generation commonly use 3D data structures or view-aligned fields. In contrast, we introduce the first method that encodes scene information into a small set of permutation-invariant tokens that is disentangled from the spatial grid. The scene tokens are predicted by a multi-view tokenizer given many context views and rendered into novel views by employing a light-weight rectified flow decoder. We show that the compression is 1-3 orders of magnitude stronger than for other representations while still reaching state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. Further, our representation can be rendered from novel trajectories, including ones deviating from the input trajectory, and we show that the decoder gracefully handles uncertainty. Finally, the highly-compressed set of unstructured latent scene tokens enables simple and efficient scene generation in 5 seconds, achieving a much better quality-speed trade-off than previous paradigms.

Building on the advances of language models, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have contributed significant improvements in video understanding. While the current video LMMs utilize advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), they rely on either image or video encoders to process visual inputs, each of which has its own limitations. Image encoders excel at capturing rich spatial details from frame sequences but lack explicit temporal context, which can be important in videos with intricate action sequences. On the other hand, video encoders provide temporal context but are often limited by computational constraints that lead to processing only sparse frames at lower resolutions, resulting in reduced contextual and spatial understanding. To this end, we introduce VideoGPT+, which combines the complementary benefits of the image encoder (for detailed spatial understanding) and the video encoder (for global temporal context modeling). The model processes videos by dividing them into smaller segments and applies an adaptive pooling strategy on features extracted by both image and video encoders. Our architecture showcases improved performance across multiple video benchmarks, including VCGBench, MVBench and Zero-shot question-answering. Further, we develop 112K video-instruction set using a novel semi-automatic annotation pipeline which further improves the model performance. Additionally, to comprehensively evaluate video LMMs, we present VCGBench-Diverse, covering 18 broad video categories such as lifestyle, sports, science, gaming, and surveillance videos. This benchmark with 4,354 question-answer pairs evaluates the generalization of existing LMMs on dense video captioning, spatial and temporal understanding, and complex reasoning, ensuring comprehensive assessment across diverse video types and dynamics. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/VideoGPT-plus.

Video Captioning (VC) is a challenging multi-modal task since it requires describing the scene in language by understanding various and complex videos. For machines, the traditional VC follows the "imaging-compression-decoding-and-then-captioning" pipeline, where compression is pivot for storage and transmission. However, in such a pipeline, some potential shortcomings are inevitable, i.e., information redundancy resulting in low efficiency and information loss during the sampling process for captioning. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel VC pipeline to generate captions directly from the compressed measurement, which can be captured by a snapshot compressive sensing camera and we dub our model SnapCap. To be more specific, benefiting from the signal simulation, we have access to obtain abundant measurement-video-annotation data pairs for our model. Besides, to better extract language-related visual representations from the compressed measurement, we propose to distill the knowledge from videos via a pre-trained CLIP with plentiful language-vision associations to guide the learning of our SnapCap. To demonstrate the effectiveness of SnapCap, we conduct experiments on two widely-used VC datasets. Both the qualitative and quantitative results verify the superiority of our pipeline over conventional VC pipelines. In particular, compared to the "caption-after-reconstruction" methods, our SnapCap can run at least 3times faster, and achieve better caption results.

Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) have improved performance by increasing the number of visual tokens, which are often significantly longer than text tokens. However, we observe that most real-world scenarios do not require such an extensive number of visual tokens. While the performance drops significantly in a small subset of OCR-related tasks, models still perform accurately in most other general VQA tasks with only 1/4 resolution. Therefore, we propose to dynamically process distinct samples with different resolutions, and present a new paradigm for visual token compression, namely, VisionThink. It starts with a downsampled image and smartly decides whether it is sufficient for problem solving. Otherwise, the model could output a special token to request the higher-resolution image. Compared to existing Efficient VLM methods that compress tokens using fixed pruning ratios or thresholds, VisionThink autonomously decides whether to compress tokens case by case. As a result, it demonstrates strong fine-grained visual understanding capability on OCR-related tasks, and meanwhile saves substantial visual tokens on simpler tasks. We adopt reinforcement learning and propose the LLM-as-Judge strategy to successfully apply RL to general VQA tasks. Moreover, we carefully design a reward function and penalty mechanism to achieve a stable and reasonable image resize call ratio. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority, efficiency, and effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/VisionThink.

Recently, deep learning technology has been successfully applied in the field of image compression, leading to superior rate-distortion performance. It is crucial to design an effective and efficient entropy model to estimate the probability distribution of the latent representation. However, the majority of entropy models primarily focus on one-dimensional correlation processing between channel and spatial information. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Channel-wise and Global-inter attention Context (ACGC) entropy model, which can efficiently achieve dual feature aggregation in both inter-slice and intraslice contexts. Specifically, we divide the latent representation into different slices and then apply the ACGC model in a parallel checkerboard context to achieve faster decoding speed and higher rate-distortion performance. In order to capture redundant global features across different slices, we utilize deformable attention in adaptive global-inter attention to dynamically refine the attention weights based on the actual spatial relationships and context. Furthermore, in the main transformation structure, we propose a high-performance S2LIC model. We introduce the residual SwinV2 Transformer model to capture global feature information and utilize a dense block network as the feature enhancement module to improve the nonlinear representation of the image within the transformation structure. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves faster encoding and decoding speeds and outperforms VTM-17.1 and some recent learned image compression methods in both PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics.

Vision Transformers are increasingly embedded in industrial systems due to their superior performance, but their memory and power requirements make deploying them to edge devices a challenging task. Hence, model compression techniques are now widely used to deploy models on edge devices as they decrease the resource requirements and make model inference very fast and efficient. But their reliability and robustness from a security perspective is another major issue in safety-critical applications. Adversarial attacks are like optical illusions for ML algorithms and they can severely impact the accuracy and reliability of models. In this work we investigate the transferability of adversarial samples across the SOTA Vision Transformer models across 3 SOTA compressed versions and infer the effects different compression techniques have on adversarial attacks.

In this work, we study the Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model. Redundant vision tokens consume a significant amount of computational memory and resources. Therefore, many previous works compress them in the Vision Projector to reduce the number of vision tokens. However, simply compressing in the Vision Projector can lead to the loss of visual information, especially for tasks that rely on fine-grained spatial relationships, such as OCR and Chart \& Table Understanding. To address this problem, we propose Vision Remember, which is inserted between the LLM decoder layers to allow vision tokens to re-memorize vision features. Specifically, we retain multi-level vision features and resample them with the vision tokens that have interacted with the text token. During the resampling process, each vision token only attends to a local region in vision features, which is referred to as saliency-enhancing local attention. Saliency-enhancing local attention not only improves computational efficiency but also captures more fine-grained contextual information and spatial relationships within the region. Comprehensive experiments on multiple visual understanding benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method when combined with various Efficient Vision Projectors, showing performance gains without sacrificing efficiency. Based on Vision Remember, LLaVA-VR with only 2B parameters is also superior to previous representative MLLMs such as Tokenpacker-HD-7B and DeepSeek-VL-7B.

Unifying multimodal understanding, generation and reconstruction representation in a single tokenizer remains a key challenge in building unified models. Previous research predominantly attempts to address this in a dual encoder paradigm, e.g., utilizing the separate encoders for understanding and generation respectively or balancing semantic representations and low-level features with contrastive loss. In this paper, we propose VQRAE, a Vector Quantization version of Representation AutoEncoders, which pioneers the first exploration in unified representation to produce Continuous semantic features for image understanding and Discrete tokens for visual generation within a unified tokenizer. Specifically, we build upon pretrained vision foundation models with a symmetric ViT decoder and adopt a two-stage training strategy: first, it freezes the encoder and learns a high-dimensional semantic VQ codebook with pixel reconstruction objective; then jointly optimizes the encoder with self-distillation constraints. This design enables negligible semantic information for maintaining the ability of multimodal understanding, discrete tokens that are compatible for generation and fine-grained reconstruction. Besides, we identify the intriguing property in quantizing semantic encoders that rely on high-dimensional codebook in contrast to the previous common practice of low-dimensional codebook in image reconstruction. The semantic VQ codebook can achieve a 100% utilization ratio at a dimension of 1536. VQRAE presents competitive performance on several benchmarks of visual understanding, generation and reconstruction with promising scaling property in the autoregressive paradigm for its discrete merits.

Standardized lossy video coding is at the core of almost all real-world video processing pipelines. Rate control is used to enable standard codecs to adapt to different network bandwidth conditions or storage constraints. However, standard video codecs (e.g., H.264) and their rate control modules aim to minimize video distortion w.r.t. human quality assessment. We demonstrate empirically that standard-coded videos vastly deteriorate the performance of deep vision models. To overcome the deterioration of vision performance, this paper presents the first end-to-end learnable deep video codec control that considers both bandwidth constraints and downstream deep vision performance, while adhering to existing standardization. We demonstrate that our approach better preserves downstream deep vision performance than traditional standard video coding.

While vision transformers (ViTs) have shown great potential in computer vision tasks, their intense computation and memory requirements pose challenges for practical applications. Existing post-training quantization methods leverage value redistribution or specialized quantizers to address the non-normal distribution in ViTs. However, without considering the asymmetry in activations and relying on hand-crafted settings, these methods often struggle to maintain performance under low-bit quantization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SmoothQuant with bias term (SQ-b) to alleviate the asymmetry issue and reduce the clamping loss. We also introduce optimal scaling factor ratio search (OPT-m) to determine quantization parameters by a data-dependent mechanism automatically. To further enhance the compressibility, we incorporate the above-mentioned techniques and propose a mixed-precision post-training quantization framework for vision transformers (MPTQ-ViT). We develop greedy mixed-precision quantization (Greedy MP) to allocate layer-wise bit-width considering both model performance and compressibility. Our experiments on ViT, DeiT, and Swin demonstrate significant accuracy improvements compared with SOTA on the ImageNet dataset. Specifically, our proposed methods achieve accuracy improvements ranging from 0.90% to 23.35% on 4-bit ViTs with single-precision and from 3.82% to 78.14% on 5-bit fully quantized ViTs with mixed-precision.

The feature maps of vision encoders are fundamental to myriad modern AI tasks, ranging from core perception algorithms (e.g. semantic segmentation, object detection, depth perception, etc.) to modern multimodal understanding in vision-language models (VLMs). Currently, in computer vision, the frontier of general purpose vision backbones is Vision Transformers (ViT), typically trained using contrastive loss (e.g. CLIP). A key problem with most off-the-shelf ViTs, particularly CLIP, is that these models are inflexibly low resolution. Most run at 224 times 224px, while the "high-resolution" versions are around 378-448px, but still inflexible. We introduce a novel method to coherently and cheaply upsample the feature maps of low-resolution vision encoders while picking up on fine-grained details that would otherwise be lost due to resolution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on core perception tasks as well as within agglomerative model training using RADIO as a way of providing richer targets for distillation. Code available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FeatSharp .

We propose Parabolic Position Encoding (PaPE), a parabola-based position encoding for vision modalities in attention-based architectures. Given a set of vision tokens-such as images, point clouds, videos, or event camera streams-our objective is to encode their positions while accounting for the characteristics of vision modalities. Prior works have largely extended position encodings from 1D-sequences in language to nD-structures in vision, but only with partial account of vision characteristics. We address this gap by designing PaPE from principles distilled from prior work: translation invariance, rotation invariance (PaPE-RI), distance decay, directionality, and context awareness. We evaluate PaPE on 8 datasets that span 4 modalities. We find that either PaPE or PaPE-RI achieves the top performance on 7 out of 8 datasets. Extrapolation experiments on ImageNet-1K show that PaPE extrapolates remarkably well, improving in absolute terms by up to 10.5% over the next-best position encoding. Code is available at https://github.com/DTU-PAS/parabolic-position-encoding.

In the field of neural data compression, the prevailing focus has been on optimizing algorithms for either classical distortion metrics, such as PSNR or SSIM, or human perceptual quality. With increasing amounts of data consumed by machines rather than humans, a new paradigm of machine-oriented compressionx2013which prioritizes the retention of features salient for machine perception over traditional human-centric criteriax2013has emerged, creating several new challenges to the development, evaluation, and deployment of systems utilizing lossy compression. In particular, it is unclear how different approaches to lossy compression will affect the performance of downstream machine perception tasks. To address this under-explored area, we evaluate various perception modelsx2013including image classification, image segmentation, speech recognition, and music source separationx2013under severe lossy compression. We utilize several popular codecs spanning conventional, neural, and generative compression architectures. Our results indicate three key findings: (1) using generative compression, it is feasible to leverage highly compressed data while incurring a negligible impact on machine perceptual quality; (2) machine perceptual quality correlates strongly with deep similarity metrics, indicating a crucial role of these metrics in the development of machine-oriented codecs; and (3) using lossy compressed datasets, (e.g. ImageNet) for pre-training can lead to counter-intuitive scenarios where lossy compression increases machine perceptual quality rather than degrading it. To encourage engagement on this growing area of research, our code and experiments are available at: https://github.com/danjacobellis/MPQ.

With the rapid advancement of stereo vision technologies, stereo image compression has emerged as a crucial field that continues to draw significant attention. Previous approaches have primarily employed a unidirectional paradigm, where the compression of one view is dependent on the other, resulting in imbalanced compression. To address this issue, we introduce a symmetric bidirectional stereo image compression architecture, named BiSIC. Specifically, we propose a 3D convolution based codec backbone to capture local features and incorporate bidirectional attention blocks to exploit global features. Moreover, we design a novel cross-dimensional entropy model that integrates various conditioning factors, including the spatial context, channel context, and stereo dependency, to effectively estimate the distribution of latent representations for entropy coding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed BiSIC outperforms conventional image/video compression standards, as well as state-of-the-art learning-based methods, in terms of both PSNR and MS-SSIM.

Video-to-video translation aims to generate video frames of a target domain from an input video. Despite its usefulness, the existing networks require enormous computations, necessitating their model compression for wide use. While there exist compression methods that improve computational efficiency in various image/video tasks, a generally-applicable compression method for video-to-video translation has not been studied much. In response, we present Shortcut-V2V, a general-purpose compression framework for video-to-video translation. Shourcut-V2V avoids full inference for every neighboring video frame by approximating the intermediate features of a current frame from those of the previous frame. Moreover, in our framework, a newly-proposed block called AdaBD adaptively blends and deforms features of neighboring frames, which makes more accurate predictions of the intermediate features possible. We conduct quantitative and qualitative evaluations using well-known video-to-video translation models on various tasks to demonstrate the general applicability of our framework. The results show that Shourcut-V2V achieves comparable performance compared to the original video-to-video translation model while saving 3.2-5.7x computational cost and 7.8-44x memory at test time.

Vision Transformers (ViT) have emerged as the de-facto choice for numerous industry grade vision solutions. But their inference cost can be prohibitive for many settings, as they compute self-attention in each layer which suffers from quadratic computational complexity in the number of tokens. On the other hand, spatial information in images and spatio-temporal information in videos is usually sparse and redundant. In this work, we introduce LookupViT, that aims to exploit this information sparsity to reduce ViT inference cost. LookupViT provides a novel general purpose vision transformer block that operates by compressing information from higher resolution tokens to a fixed number of tokens. These few compressed tokens undergo meticulous processing, while the higher-resolution tokens are passed through computationally cheaper layers. Information sharing between these two token sets is enabled through a bidirectional cross-attention mechanism. The approach offers multiple advantages - (a) easy to implement on standard ML accelerators (GPUs/TPUs) via standard high-level operators, (b) applicable to standard ViT and its variants, thus generalizes to various tasks, (c) can handle different tokenization and attention approaches. LookupViT also offers flexibility for the compressed tokens, enabling performance-computation trade-offs in a single trained model. We show LookupViT's effectiveness on multiple domains - (a) for image-classification (ImageNet-1K and ImageNet-21K), (b) video classification (Kinetics400 and Something-Something V2), (c) image captioning (COCO-Captions) with a frozen encoder. LookupViT provides 2times reduction in FLOPs while upholding or improving accuracy across these domains. In addition, LookupViT also demonstrates out-of-the-box robustness and generalization on image classification (ImageNet-C,R,A,O), improving by up to 4% over ViT.