#01Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Where to Connect? Boosting MLLMs via Dynamic Gated Pathways across ALL ViT and LLM Layers
Yingying Yan, Jiaqi Tang, Wei Wei and 7 more
A central yet under-explored question in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is where to connect---how visual information from a hierarchical vision encoder should be wired into the layer-wise semantics of a large language model. Mainstream MLLMs inject a fixed single-layer visual representation into the LLM and treat all LLM layers as a single consumer, ignoring that different layers demand different visual granularities. Recent multi-layer fusion methods either compress hierarchical features on the encoder side or rely on predefined sparse or hierarchical layer-to-layer connections, and therefore stop short of modeling adaptive cross-layer interactions between the ViT and LLM hierarchies. We address this gap with DGP (Dynamic Gated Pathways), a routing mechanism that establishes all-to-all connections between every ViT layer and every LLM layer, with each LLM layer dynamically gating its preference over visual layers conditioned on its own semantic state. Built on top of LLaVA-1.5-7B and 13B, DGP delivers consistent gains over the LLaVA-1.5-7B baseline (e.g., +4.2 on SQA$^{I}$, +3.3 on MM-Vet, +3.1 on VizWiz and LLaVA$^{W}$) and surpasses prior multi-layer visual fusion methods on most benchmarks. Layer-wise routing analyses further show that different LLM layers do select different visual granularities on demand, supporting both the effectiveness and interpretability of the proposed dynamic gated pathways. The code is available: https://github.com/YingyingYan1/DGP.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Visual Token Routing: Learning to keep tokens that matter
Pranjal Aggarwal, Sean Welleck
Computer-use agents (CUAs) have recently achieved superhuman performance on several long-horizon benchmarks. However, their computational cost limits their use in long-horizon tasks and real-time domains such as video games. A key bottleneck is representing each screenshot as thousands of visual tokens, which accumulate into long contexts as agents reason over extended interaction histories. We observe that most of these visual tokens are either semantically irrelevant to the agent's next action or temporally redundant across screenshots. Building on this observation, we introduce Visual Token Routing (VTR), a joint training framework for learning sparse visual representations that preserve the information needed for action prediction. In VTR, we train the vision-language model together with a lightweight spatio-temporal router that examines each image region in the current and previous screenshots and decides whether its visual token enters the language model. We optimize the router using an adaptive loss to keep the number of visual tokens as small as possible while minimizing performance degradation. With just 2,000 training steps, VTR matches the performance of the full-resolution model on OSWorld, CUA-World, and video game action prediction, while using 2.5-5.8x fewer visual tokens. These savings reduce inference cost by up to 3.3x and speed up prefill by up to 2.9x. VTR also outperforms lowering the image resolution and other baselines for dropping tokens, by up to 12.8 points on OSWorld. Overall, VTR enables computer-use agents to process only the visual tokens they need, allowing them to be used in long-horizon tasks and real-time domains at a fraction of the computational cost. Code and models are available at https://pranjal2041.github.io/vtr
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Semantic Residual Vector Quantization for Sign Language Generation
Chang Liu, Ke Han, Niccolò Biondi and 4 more
Sign language generation (SLG) maps written sentences into signing motion while preserving both lexical content and fine-grained articulation. This requires a model to decide what signs should be expressed and to realize them through precise handshape, trajectory, facial expression and body coordination. Existing pose-based systems and reconstruction-only motion tokenizers often entangle these two decisions, leaving the generator without an explicit text-aligned intermediate target for what to sign before refining how to sign it. To address this issue, we introduce Semantic Residual Vector Quantization (SRVQ), a framework for SLG that frames generation as a two-level process moving from semantics to kinematics. The newly introduced SRV Quantizer learns a hierarchy in which the first residual level encodes sign content and subsequent levels refine pose, handshape, trajectory, and body coordination, all within a single quantizer and without separate semantic representations or external planning stages. Through word-aware conditioning for hierarchical code generation, a masked semantic generator predicts semantic codes and a kinematic generator completes the residual codes for full SMPL-X motion synthesis. We evaluate using retrieval and FID in a shared text-motion embedding space, alongside standard geometric metrics. On CSL-Daily and Phoenix-2014T, SRVQ achieves R@1 of 82.3 and 70.3, outperforming the previous SOTA by 30 and 46 points, respectively.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Context-Aware Autoregressive Image Generation for Emerging Reasoning Properties
Jixuan Ying, Haoyu Liu, Timing Yang and 7 more
Autoregressive image generation has recently emerged as a competitive visual generation paradigm, yet its generation order is often predefined or heuristic, such as next-patch prediction, random-order prediction, or one-step generation for specific scales. We observe that these strategies can cause models to overlook important structural dependencies in images, thereby limiting both structural robustness and reasoning capability. In this work, we propose a context-aware autoregressive generation framework, where the model dynamically determines the next token location based on global context and current local information. Rather than following a fixed or random order, our method allows the generation process to adapt to image structure and semantic dependencies. Extensive experiments show that context-aware generation significantly improves structural robustness across different image AR paradigms, including masked autoregressive and scale-wise autoregressive models. Beyond quantitative improvements, we further observe emerging reasoning properties: the model can better understand complex semantic instructions and generate images that more faithfully follow the given guidance. These findings suggest that generation order is a critical yet underexplored factor in image autoregressive modeling, and that context-aware decoding can unlock stronger reasoning-aware visual generation capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/Hpesojyjx/Saccades-AR.
#05Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Same Layout, Different Count: What Number Words Do Past Ten in Text-to-Image Models
Liang Yue, Eric A. Vance
Ask SD3.5-Medium for twelve of an object and then, from the same starting noise, for twenty-five. The picture keeps its layout, but the count changes about as much as it would under a new random seed, and in no consistent direction. We study what number words do once a request passes about ten objects, in five open text-to-image models. Holding the object and the starting noise fixed, we change one thing at a time, and people who never see the request count 3,088 of the images. Every model follows the number for small crowds, but only up to a point, its reach: SD3.5-M and FLUX.1-dev stop following it soon after ten, while FLUX.2 [klein] and Qwen-Image follow it loosely up to twenty-five. Beyond SD3.5-M's reach, the coarse part of the starting noise fixes the composition of the picture but not how many objects it holds: redrawing only the noise finer than an eighth of the image keeps the layout as well as a new number does, and already moves the count two-thirds as far. The number word still reaches the denoiser and acts in its first steps, but nothing we tried gives it a clear direction. Shown instead as a noised grid in the starting latent, the count is drawn: people find it in 59% of images, against 4% when it is only told. Past ten, an exact-match score barely separates a model that follows the number loosely from one that ignores it, and a relative-error score can even prefer a constant guess of sixteen. A same-noise test with a few requests per object tells them apart.