让多模态大模型看更少、算得更快,动态调节视觉信息和计算量。
Look Less, Think Faster: Joint Token-Compute Adaptation for Multimodal LLMs

- 同时控制视觉令牌数和语言模型计算量,协同优化推理效率。
- 在多个基准上实现更高精度与更低延迟的平衡,优于现有自适应方法。
- 适合需要快速部署多模态模型的实时应用,如智能客服、图像问答。
多模态大语言模型(MLLM)在视觉-语言任务中表现强劲,但其高推理成本——源于大量视觉令牌和大语言模型的重计算——仍是实际部署的主要障碍。现有方法通过剪枝冗余视觉令牌或跳过语言模型层/头来降低成本,但通常独立优化各维度,忽视了计算资源需根据输入内容动态分配这一根本耦合关系。为此,本文提出 SmartVL:一个统一的自适应推理框架,可联合调节视觉令牌数量与模型计算能力,以响应不同的输入内容和计算预算。SmartVL引入视觉侧令牌控制器,动态选择关键视觉信息;同时设计语言模型侧计算控制器,自适应调整计算量。两个控制器通过共享预算编码协同工作,并利用可微分延迟估计器实现端到端训练,从而学习跨阶段的资源分配策略。在多个 MLLM 基准测试中,与以往方法相比,SmartVL 在保持低延迟的同时显著提升精度,达成更优的准确率-效率权衡。项目页面:https://www.schaterji.io/publications/2026/jointtokencompute。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated strong performance across vision-language tasks. However, their high inference cost, arising from both the large number of input visual tokens and the heavy computation of the large language model (LLM), remains a key barrier to practical deployment. Recent work attempts to reduce the cost by adaptively optimizing individual dimensions, e.g., pruning redundant visual tokens or skipping LLM layers and heads. Nonetheless, prior approaches typically treat these dimensions independently and overlook a fundamental coupling: the available compute resources must be dynamically allocated across all dimensions based on the input content. To bridge the gap, we propose SmartVL, a unified adaptive inference framework that jointly controls vision token number and model compute capability in response to varying input contents and compute budgets. SmartVL introduces a vision-side token controller that dynamically selects informative visual tokens and an LLM-side compute controller that adaptively adjusts LLM computation. Importantly, these controllers are trained to coordinate with each other so that the overall inference cost satisfies a target budget. To allow this joint scheduling, we connect the controllers using a shared budget encoding and leverage a differentiable latency estimator for end-to-end training. This design enables SmartVL to learn cross-stage allocation strategies that adapt to both input complexity and runtime compute constraints. Experiments across multiple MLLM benchmarks demonstrate that, with joint scheduling, SmartVL consistently outperforms prior adaptive methods and achieves superior accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontiers. Project page: https://www.schaterji.io/publications/2026/jointtokencompute.
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