根据错误后果重要性分配视觉计算资源,提升高风险任务准确性
Not All Visual Tokens Are Equally Safe to Remove:Consequence-Sensitive Visual Token Compression

- 按错误代价动态分配视觉计算量,而非统一处理
- 高风险任务错误率从30%降至13.3%,相同预算下表现更优
- 适用于医疗、金融等对错误敏感的现实场景
视觉语言模型的视觉标记压缩通常基于注意力、冗余度或不确定性等标准,在固定计算预算下最大化平均准确率,隐含假设所有错误代价相同。然而下游任务中错误后果往往不对称:误读发票金额远比误判背景颜色代价更高。为此,我们提出后果敏感的视觉标记压缩方法,根据潜在错误成本在不同请求间分配视觉计算资源。方法采用‘校准-分配’流程:离线估计特定后果的误差预算曲线,线上利用问题或任务信息中的后果信号进行预算分配。在控制变量的同文档基准测试中,高/低后果问题来自相同图像,仅内容无法区分其代价。在此设置下,本方法将高风险错误率从0.300降至0.133,而内容驱动分配器效果与均匀分配相当。通过测量不同成本比下误差率随标记预算的变化,我们得出分配前沿:当错误代价相等时均匀分配最优;随着代价差距增大,向高后果任务转移计算资源愈发有益。该原则在三个密集视觉语言基准、两种预算实现机制(标记删除与分辨率重分配)、两种VLM架构及多种选择策略上均具良好泛化能力。在真实混合负载中,后果敏感分配使成本加权误差降低38%,同时相比全分辨率推理延迟降低约21%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Visual token compression for vision--language models (VLMs) has largely relied on criteria such as attention, redundancy, and uncertainty to maximize average accuracy under a fixed compute budget, implicitly assuming that all errors carry equal cost. However, the consequence of an incorrect prediction on downstream tasks is rarely symmetric: misreading an invoice amount can be far more costly than misclassifying a background color. Motivated by this, we introduce consequence-sensitive visual token compression, which allocates visual computation across requests according to their potential error costs. Our method follows a calibrate-then-allocate procedure, estimating consequence-specific error-budget curves offline and applying the calibrated token budgets online using consequence signals available from question or task information. On a controlled within-task benchmark, high- and low-consequence questions are drawn from the same document images, so content alone cannot reveal which questions are costly to get wrong. In this setting, our method reduces high-stakes errors from 0.300 to 0.133 under the same total token budget, whereas a content-driven allocator performs no better than uniform allocation. Measuring how error rates change with token budget across different cost ratios, we derive an allocation frontier: uniform allocation is optimal when errors are equally costly, and token transfer toward high-consequence questions becomes increasingly beneficial as the cost gap grows. This allocation principle generalizes well across three dense vision-language benchmarks, two budget realization mechanisms (token deletion and resolution reallocation), two VLM architectures, and multiple token selection strategies. On a realistic mixed workload, consequence-sensitive allocation reduces cost-weighted error by 38% while achieving approximately 21% lower latency than full-resolution inference.
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