arXiv subjects

Haiwen Diao

Publications and source records attributed to Haiwen Diao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

ERA: Entropy-Guided Visual Token Pruning with Rectified Attention for Efficient MLLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) incur prohibitive inference costs due to long visual token sequences. Training-free visual token reduction provides an efficient solution. However, existing methods distort attention distributions, giving rise to a phenomenon we term Attention Logit Collapse. To address this issue, we propose ERA, an Entropy-guided visual token pruning framework with Rectified Attention for efficient MLLMs. Specifically, ERA comprises three crucial components: Dual-view Entropy Pruning (DEP), Bias-aware Token Recycling (BTR), and Logit-preserving Attention Rectification (LAR). First, DEP identifies representative anchor tokens by jointly modeling visual diversity and head-wise saliency. BTR then recycles pruned tokens into their corresponding anchors while estimating a cluster-level logit bias. Building upon this, LAR injects the estimated bias into attention logits, effectively rectifying the collapse induced by token reduction. Together, these components preserve visual evidence even under aggressive compression, enabling robust performance across single-image, multi-image, and video settings on a wide range of MLLMs. Beyond delivering practical acceleration, ERA establishes logit-preserving visual token pruning as a principled framework for efficient MLLMs, unifying theoretical foundation, algorithmic design, and practical deployment. The code is at https://github.com/924973292/ERA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Show the Signal, Hide the Noise: Spectral Forcing for Pixel-Space Diffusion

Pixel-space diffusion models are trained on full-bandwidth noisy images, yet the useful signal available to the denoiser is strongly frequency dependent. Under rectified-flow diffusion and natural-image power-law spectra, the per-band data-to-noise contour $k^{*}(t) = (1-t)^{-2/α}$ separates a signal-bearing low-frequency region from a noise-dominated high-frequency region at each time $t$. We show that this implicit coarse-to-fine structure is not merely descriptive: it induces a capacity-allocation problem. A standard pixel-space denoiser must discover the moving bandwidth boundary internally and can spend computation on frequency-time regions where the optimal prediction collapses to deterministic baselines rather than data-distribution modeling. To make this boundary explicit, we introduce Spectral Forcing, a parameter-free, time-conditional 2D-DCT low-pass operator applied to the noisy input before the patch embedder. Its cutoff expands monotonically with the diffusion time and becomes the identity at the data endpoint. Through controlled synthetic experiments, we identify the regime in which the operator is beneficial: coarse patch tokenization and data whose high-frequency content is predominantly noise rather than essential signal. On ImageNet-256 with JiT-700M/32, Spectral Forcing consistently improves both FID and Inception Score across different training epochs, demonstrating robust gains throughout training; at finer tokenization, the spectral forcing is still competitive. We further insert the unchanged operator into SenseNova-U1, a unified text-to-image model, where it improves DPG-Bench and GenEval, showing that the input-side spectral prior transfers beyond class-conditional generation. These results suggest a route to capacity-efficient pixel-space diffusion by showing the signal and hiding the noise.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

From Pixels to Words -- Towards Native One-Vision Models at Scale

Current vision-language models (VLMs) typically stitch together separate image encoders and language decoders via multi-stage alignment, a modular framework that inevitably fragments pixel-level signals across frames and scatters early pixel-word interactions. In parallel, native VLMs, despite impressive performance on single images, remain largely unexplored in multi-image, video understanding, and spatial intelligence. Hence, we introduce NEO-ov, a native foundation model that learns cross-frame and pixel-word correspondence end-to-end, without any external encoders, auxiliary adapters, or post-hoc fusion. By eliminating module boundaries entirely, NEO-ov enables fine-grained and unified spatiotemporal modeling to emerge natively inside the model. Notably, NEO-ov largely narrows the gap to modular counterparts while excelling at fine-grained visual perception, validating that native "one-vision" architectures are not only feasible but competitive at scale. Beyond empirical performance, we unveil systematic architectural analyses and detailed training recipes to facilitate subsequent native multimodal modeling. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/NEO.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SenseNova-U1: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with NEO-unify Architecture

Recent large vision-language models (VLMs) remain fundamentally constrained by a persistent dichotomy: understanding and generation are treated as distinct problems, leading to fragmented architectures, cascaded pipelines, and misaligned representation spaces. We argue that this divide is not merely an engineering artifact, but a structural limitation that hinders the emergence of native multimodal intelligence. Hence, we introduce SenseNova-U1, a native unified multimodal paradigm built upon NEO-unify, in which understanding and generation evolve as synergistic views of a single underlying process. We launch two native unified variants, SenseNova-U1-8B-MoT and SenseNova-U1-A3B-MoT, built on dense (8B) and mixture-of-experts (30B-A3B) understanding baselines, respectively. Designed from first principles, they rival top-tier understanding-only VLMs across text understanding, vision-language perception, knowledge reasoning, agentic decision-making, and spatial intelligence. Meanwhile, they deliver strong semantic consistency and visual fidelity, excelling in conventional or knowledge-intensive any-to-image (X2I) synthesis, complex text-rich infographic generation, and interleaved vision-language generation, with or without think patterns. Beyond performance, we show detailed model design, data preprocessing, pre-/post-training, and inference strategies to support community research. Last but not least, preliminary evidence demonstrates that our models extend beyond perception and generation, performing strongly in vision-language-action (VLA) and world model (WM) scenarios. This points toward a broader roadmap where models do not translate between modalities, but think and act across them in a native manner. Multimodal AI is no longer about connecting separate systems, but about building a unified one and trusting the necessary capabilities to emerge from within.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

The Prism Hypothesis: Harmonizing Semantic and Pixel Representations via Unified Autoencoding

Deep representations across modalities are inherently intertwined. In this paper, we systematically analyze the spectral characteristics of various semantic and pixel encoders. Interestingly, our study uncovers a highly inspiring and rarely explored correspondence between an encoder's feature spectrum and its functional role: semantic encoders primarily capture low-frequency components that encode abstract meaning, whereas pixel encoders additionally retain high-frequency information that conveys fine-grained detail. This heuristic finding offers a unifying perspective that ties encoder behavior to its underlying spectral structure. We define it as the Prism Hypothesis, where each data modality can be viewed as a projection of the natural world onto a shared feature spectrum, just like the prism. Building on this insight, we propose Unified Autoencoding (UAE), a model that harmonizes semantic structure and pixel details via an innovative frequency-band modulator, enabling their seamless coexistence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UAE effectively unifies semantic abstraction and pixel-level fidelity within a single latent space, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, we show that UAE can be directly applied to pixel-space modeling, significantly improving both FID and IS over the vanilla JIT baseline. Our code is avaliable at: https://github.com/WeichenFan/UAE.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

From Pixels to Words -- Towards Native Vision-Language Primitives at Scale

The edifice of native Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has emerged as a rising contender to typical modular VLMs, shaped by evolving model architectures and training paradigms. Yet, two lingering clouds cast shadows over its widespread exploration and promotion: (-) What fundamental constraints set native VLMs apart from modular ones, and to what extent can these barriers be overcome? (-) How to make research in native VLMs more accessible and democratized, thereby accelerating progress in the field. In this paper, we clarify these challenges and outline guiding principles for constructing native VLMs. Specifically, one native VLM primitive should: (i) effectively align pixel and word representations within a shared semantic space; (ii) seamlessly integrate the strengths of formerly separate vision and language modules; (iii) inherently embody various cross-modal properties that support unified vision-language encoding, aligning, and reasoning. Hence, we launch NEO, a novel family of native VLMs built from first principles, greatly narrowing the gap with top-tier modular counterparts across diverse real-world scenarios. With 390M image-text examples, NEO efficiently develops visual perception from scratch while mitigating vision-language conflicts inside a dense and monolithic model crafted from our elaborate primitives. We position NEO as a cornerstone for scalable and powerful native VLM development, paired with a rich set of reusable components that foster a cost-effective and extensible ecosystem. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/NEO.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Visual Jigsaw Post-Training Improves MLLMs

Reinforcement learning based post-training has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the alignment and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While vision-centric post-training is crucial for enhancing MLLMs' intrinsic understanding of visual signals, current post-training paradigms are predominantly text-centric, where dense visual inputs are only leveraged to extract sparse cues for text-based reasoning. There exist a few approaches in this direction, however, they often still rely on text as an intermediate mediator or introduce additional visual generative designs. In this work, we introduce Visual Jigsaw, a generic self-supervised post-training framework designed to strengthen visual understanding in MLLMs. Visual Jigsaw is formulated as a general ordering task: visual inputs are partitioned, shuffled, and the model must reconstruct the visual information by producing the correct permutation in natural language. This naturally aligns with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), requires no additional visual generative components, and derives its supervisory signal automatically without any annotations. We instantiate Visual Jigsaw across three visual modalities, including images, videos, and 3D data. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in fine-grained perception, temporal reasoning, and 3D spatial understanding. Our findings highlight the potential of self-supervised vision-centric tasks in post-training MLLMs and aim to inspire further research on vision-centric pretext designs. Project Page: https://penghao-wu.github.io/visual_jigsaw/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Regularizing Subspace Redundancy of Low-Rank Adaptation

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants have delivered strong capability in Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) by minimizing trainable parameters and benefiting from reparameterization. However, their projection matrices remain unrestricted during training, causing high representation redundancy and diminishing the effectiveness of feature adaptation in the resulting subspaces. While existing methods mitigate this by manually adjusting the rank or implicitly applying channel-wise masks, they lack flexibility and generalize poorly across various datasets and architectures. Hence, we propose ReSoRA, a method that explicitly models redundancy between mapping subspaces and adaptively Regularizes Subspace redundancy of Low-Rank Adaptation. Specifically, it theoretically decomposes the low-rank submatrices into multiple equivalent subspaces and systematically applies de-redundancy constraints to the feature distributions across different projections. Extensive experiments validate that our proposed method consistently facilitates existing state-of-the-art PETL methods across various backbones and datasets in vision-language retrieval and standard visual classification benchmarks. Besides, as a training supervision, ReSoRA can be seamlessly integrated into existing approaches in a plug-and-play manner, with no additional inference costs. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Lucenova/ReSoRA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

EVEv2: Improved Baselines for Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models

Existing encoder-free vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly narrowing the performance gap with their encoder-based counterparts, highlighting the promising potential for unified multimodal systems with structural simplicity and efficient deployment. We systematically clarify the performance gap between VLMs using pre-trained vision encoders, discrete tokenizers, and minimalist visual layers from scratch, deeply excavating the under-examined characteristics of encoder-free VLMs. We develop efficient strategies for encoder-free VLMs that rival mainstream encoder-based ones. After an in-depth investigation, we launch EVEv2.0, a new and improved family of encoder-free VLMs. We show that: (i) Properly decomposing and hierarchically associating vision and language within a unified model reduces interference between modalities. (ii) A well-designed training strategy enables effective optimization for encoder-free VLMs. Through extensive evaluation, our EVEv2.0 represents a thorough study for developing a decoder-only architecture across modalities, demonstrating superior data efficiency and strong vision-reasoning capability. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/baaivision/EVE.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

End-to-End Vision Tokenizer Tuning

Existing vision tokenization isolates the optimization of vision tokenizers from downstream training, implicitly assuming the visual tokens can generalize well across various tasks, e.g., image generation and visual question answering. The vision tokenizer optimized for low-level reconstruction is agnostic to downstream tasks requiring varied representations and semantics. This decoupled paradigm introduces a critical misalignment: The loss of the vision tokenization can be the representation bottleneck for target tasks. For example, errors in tokenizing text in a given image lead to poor results when recognizing or generating them. To address this, we propose ETT, an end-to-end vision tokenizer tuning approach that enables joint optimization between vision tokenization and target autoregressive tasks. Unlike prior autoregressive models that use only discrete indices from a frozen vision tokenizer, ETT leverages the visual embeddings of the tokenizer codebook, and optimizes the vision tokenizers end-to-end with both reconstruction and caption objectives. ETT can be seamlessly integrated into existing training pipelines with minimal architecture modifications. Our ETT is simple to implement and integrate, without the need to adjust the original codebooks or architectures of the employed large language models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed end-to-end vision tokenizer tuning unlocks significant performance gains, i.e., 2-6% for multimodal understanding and visual generation tasks compared to frozen tokenizer baselines, while preserving the original reconstruction capability. We hope this very simple and strong method can empower multimodal foundation models besides image generation and understanding.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Exploring Dynamic Transformer for Efficient Object Tracking

The speed-precision trade-off is a critical problem for visual object tracking which usually requires low latency and deployment on constrained resources. Existing solutions for efficient tracking mainly focus on adopting light-weight backbones or modules, which nevertheless come at the cost of a sacrifice in precision. In this paper, inspired by dynamic network routing, we propose DyTrack, a dynamic transformer framework for efficient tracking. Real-world tracking scenarios exhibit diverse levels of complexity. We argue that a simple network is sufficient for easy frames in video sequences, while more computation could be assigned to difficult ones. DyTrack automatically learns to configure proper reasoning routes for various inputs, gaining better utilization of the available computational budget. Thus, it can achieve higher performance with the same running speed. We formulate instance-specific tracking as a sequential decision problem and attach terminating branches to intermediate layers of the entire model. Especially, to fully utilize the computations, we introduce the feature recycling mechanism to reuse the outputs of predecessors. Furthermore, a target-aware self-distillation strategy is designed to enhance the discriminating capabilities of early predictions by effectively mimicking the representation pattern of the deep model. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DyTrack achieves promising speed-precision trade-offs with only a single model. For instance, DyTrack obtains 64.9% AUC on LaSOT with a speed of 256 fps.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Autoregressive Video Generation without Vector Quantization

This paper presents a novel approach that enables autoregressive video generation with high efficiency. We propose to reformulate the video generation problem as a non-quantized autoregressive modeling of temporal frame-by-frame prediction and spatial set-by-set prediction. Unlike raster-scan prediction in prior autoregressive models or joint distribution modeling of fixed-length tokens in diffusion models, our approach maintains the causal property of GPT-style models for flexible in-context capabilities, while leveraging bidirectional modeling within individual frames for efficiency. With the proposed approach, we train a novel video autoregressive model without vector quantization, termed NOVA. Our results demonstrate that NOVA surpasses prior autoregressive video models in data efficiency, inference speed, visual fidelity, and video fluency, even with a much smaller model capacity, i.e., 0.6B parameters. NOVA also outperforms state-of-the-art image diffusion models in text-to-image generation tasks, with a significantly lower training cost. Additionally, NOVA generalizes well across extended video durations and enables diverse zero-shot applications in one unified model. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/baaivision/NOVA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

KARST: Multi-Kernel Kronecker Adaptation with Re-Scaling Transmission for Visual Classification

Fine-tuning pre-trained vision models for specific tasks is a common practice in computer vision. However, this process becomes more expensive as models grow larger. Recently, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a popular solution to improve training efficiency and reduce storage needs by tuning additional low-rank modules within pre-trained backbones. Despite their advantages, they struggle with limited representation capabilities and misalignment with pre-trained intermediate features. To address these issues, we introduce an innovative Multi-Kernel Kronecker Adaptation with Re-Scaling Transmission (KARST) for various recognition tasks. Specifically, its multi-kernel design extends Kronecker projections horizontally and separates adaptation matrices into multiple complementary spaces, reducing parameter dependency and creating more compact subspaces. Besides, it incorporates extra learnable re-scaling factors to better align with pre-trained feature distributions, allowing for more flexible and balanced feature aggregation. Extensive experiments validate that our KARST outperforms other PEFT counterparts with a negligible inference cost due to its re-parameterization characteristics. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Lucenova/KARST.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Infinity-MM: Scaling Multimodal Performance with Large-Scale and High-Quality Instruction Data

Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal tasks, and multimodal instruction data serves as the foundation for enhancing VLM capabilities. Despite the availability of several open-source multimodal datasets, limitations in the scale and quality of open-source instruction data hinder the performance of VLMs trained on these datasets, leading to a significant gap compared to models trained on closed-source data. To address this challenge, we introduce Infinity-MM, a large-scale multimodal instruction dataset. We collected the available multimodal instruction datasets and performed unified preprocessing, resulting in a dataset with over 40 million samples that ensures diversity and accuracy. Furthermore, to enable large-scale expansion of instruction data and support the continuous acquisition of high-quality data, we propose a synthetic instruction generation method based on a tagging system and open-source VLMs. By establishing correspondences between different types of images and associated instruction types, this method can provide essential guidance during data synthesis. Leveraging this high-quality data, we have trained a 2-billion-parameter Vision-Language Model, Aquila-VL-2B, which achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among models of similar scale. The data is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/Infinity-MM.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

MoTrans: Customized Motion Transfer with Text-driven Video Diffusion Models

Existing pretrained text-to-video (T2V) models have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating realistic videos with basic motion or camera movement. However, these models exhibit significant limitations when generating intricate, human-centric motions. Current efforts primarily focus on fine-tuning models on a small set of videos containing a specific motion. They often fail to effectively decouple motion and the appearance in the limited reference videos, thereby weakening the modeling capability of motion patterns. To this end, we propose MoTrans, a customized motion transfer method enabling video generation of similar motion in new context. Specifically, we introduce a multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based recaptioner to expand the initial prompt to focus more on appearance and an appearance injection module to adapt appearance prior from video frames to the motion modeling process. These complementary multimodal representations from recaptioned prompt and video frames promote the modeling of appearance and facilitate the decoupling of appearance and motion. In addition, we devise a motion-specific embedding for further enhancing the modeling of the specific motion. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively learns specific motion pattern from singular or multiple reference videos, performing favorably against existing methods in customized video generation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

DenseFusion-1M: Merging Vision Experts for Comprehensive Multimodal Perception

Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly emphasize complex understanding of various visual elements, including multiple objects, text information, and spatial relations. Their development for comprehensive visual perception hinges on the availability of high-quality image-text datasets that offer diverse visual elements and throughout image descriptions. However, the scarcity of such hyper-detailed datasets currently hinders progress within the MLLM community. The bottleneck stems from the limited perceptual capabilities of current caption engines, which fall short in providing complete and accurate annotations. To facilitate the cutting-edge research of MLLMs on comprehensive vision perception, we thereby propose Perceptual Fusion, using a low-budget but highly effective caption engine for complete and accurate image descriptions. Specifically, Perceptual Fusion integrates diverse perception experts as image priors to provide explicit information on visual elements and adopts an efficient MLLM as a centric pivot to mimic advanced MLLMs' perception abilities. We carefully select 1M highly representative images from uncurated LAION dataset and generate dense descriptions using our engine, dubbed DenseFusion-1M. Extensive experiments validate that our engine outperforms its counterparts, where the resulting dataset significantly improves the perception and cognition abilities of existing MLLMs across diverse vision-language benchmarks, especially with high-resolution images as inputs. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/baaivision/DenseFusion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

LLMs Can Evolve Continually on Modality for X-Modal Reasoning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have gained significant attention due to their impressive capabilities in multimodal understanding. However, existing methods rely heavily on extensive modal-specific pretraining and joint-modal tuning, leading to significant computational burdens when expanding to new modalities. In this paper, we propose PathWeave, a flexible and scalable framework with modal-Path sWitching and ExpAnsion abilities that enables MLLMs to continually EVolve on modalities for $\mathbb{X}$-modal reasoning. We leverage the concept of Continual Learning and develop an incremental training strategy atop pre-trained MLLMs, enabling their expansion to new modalities using uni-modal data, without executing joint-modal pretraining. In detail, a novel Adapter-in-Adapter (AnA) framework is introduced, in which uni-modal and cross-modal adapters are seamlessly integrated to facilitate efficient modality alignment and collaboration. Additionally, an MoE-based gating module is applied between two types of adapters to further enhance the multimodal interaction. To investigate the proposed method, we establish a challenging benchmark called Continual Learning of Modality (MCL), which consists of high-quality QA data from five distinct modalities: image, video, audio, depth and point cloud. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed AnA framework on learning plasticity and memory stability during continual learning. Furthermore, PathWeave performs comparably to state-of-the-art MLLMs while concurrently reducing parameter training burdens by 98.73%. Our code locates at https://github.com/JiazuoYu/PathWeave

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Unveiling Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models

Existing vision-language models (VLMs) mostly rely on vision encoders to extract visual features followed by large language models (LLMs) for visual-language tasks. However, the vision encoders set a strong inductive bias in abstracting visual representation, e.g., resolution, aspect ratio, and semantic priors, which could impede the flexibility and efficiency of the VLMs. Training pure VLMs that accept the seamless vision and language inputs, i.e., without vision encoders, remains challenging and rarely explored. Empirical observations reveal that direct training without encoders results in slow convergence and large performance gaps. In this work, we bridge the gap between encoder-based and encoder-free models, and present a simple yet effective training recipe towards pure VLMs. Specifically, we unveil the key aspects of training encoder-free VLMs efficiently via thorough experiments: (1) Bridging vision-language representation inside one unified decoder; (2) Enhancing visual recognition capability via extra supervision. With these strategies, we launch EVE, an encoder-free vision-language model that can be trained and forwarded efficiently. Notably, solely utilizing 35M publicly accessible data, EVE can impressively rival the encoder-based VLMs of similar capacities across multiple vision-language benchmarks. It significantly outperforms the counterpart Fuyu-8B with mysterious training procedures and undisclosed training data. We believe that EVE provides a transparent and efficient route for developing a pure decoder-only architecture across modalities. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/baaivision/EVE.

cs.CV↗