StackTok: Accelerating VLMs Inference with Budget-Adaptive Visual Token Selection
Quick summary
arXiv:2609.16841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Increasing image resolution produces ever-longer visual-token sequences in vision-language models (VLMs), substantially raising their inference cost. To reduce this overhead without retraining, existing methods select compact token subsets that prioritize query relevance, visual coverage, or a fixed trade-off between them. The appropriate balance, however, varies across queries and token budgets: localized questions favor relevance, whereas holistic questions demand broader visual coverage. We introduce StackTok, a training-free selector that t
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2609.16841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Increasing image resolution produces ever-longer visual-token sequences in vision-language models (VLMs), substantially raising their inference cost.
- To reduce this overhead without retraining, existing methods select compact token subsets that prioritize query relevance, visual coverage, or a fixed trade-off between them.
- The appropriate balance, however, varies across queries and token budgets: localized questions favor relevance, whereas holistic questions demand broader visual coverage.
Why it matters
The importance of “StackTok: Accelerating VLMs Inference with Budget-Adaptive Visual Token Selection” will be measured by what changes in practice. User behavior, access conditions, verifiable performance and responsible-use outcomes are the signals worth following.

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