Large vision-language models (LVLMs) excel at multimodal understanding but suffer from high computational costs due to redundant vision tokens. Existing pruning methods typically rely on single-layer attention scores to rank and prune redundant visual tokens to solve this inefficiency. However, as the interaction between tokens and layers is complicated, this raises a basic question: Is such a simple single-layer criterion sufficient to identify redundancy? To answer this question, we rethink the emergence of redundant visual tokens from a fundamental perspective: information flow, which models the interaction between tokens and layers by capturing how information moves between tokens across layers. We find (1) the CLS token acts as an information relay, which can simplify the complicated flow analysis; (2) the redundancy emerges progressively and dynamically via layer-wise attention concentration; and (3) relying solely on attention scores from single layers can lead to contradictory redundancy identification. Based on this, we propose FlowCut, an information-flow-aware pruning framework, mitigating the insufficiency of the current criterion for identifying redundant tokens and better aligning with the model's inherent behaviors. Extensive experiments show FlowCut achieves superior results, outperforming SoTA by 1.6% on LLaVA-1.5-7B with 88.9% token reduction, and by 4.3% on LLaVA-NeXT-7B with 94.4% reduction, delivering 3.2$\times$ speed-up in the prefilling stage.

Crossmodal matching in single-cell omics is essential for explaining biological regulatory mechanisms and enhancing downstream analyses. However, current single-cell crossmodal models often suffer from three limitations: sparse modality signals, underutilization of biological attributes, and insufficient modeling of regulatory interactions. These challenges hinder generalization in data-scarce settings and restrict the ability to uncover fine-grained biologically meaningful crossmodal relationships. Here, we present a novel framework which reformulates crossmodal matching as a graph classification task on Attributed Bipartite Graphs (ABGs). It models single-cell ATAC-RNA data as an ABG, where each expressed ATAC and RNA is treated as a distinct node with unique IDs and biological features. To model crossmodal interaction patterns on the constructed ABG, we propose Bi2Former, a biologically-driven bipartite graph transformer that learns interpretable attention over ATAC-RNA pairs. This design enables the model to effectively learn and explain biological regulatory relationships between ATAC and RNA modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Bi2Former achieves state-of-the-art performance in crossmodal matching across diverse datasets, remains robust under sparse training data, generalizes to unseen cell types and datasets, and reveals biologically meaningful regulatory patterns.

Graph attention has demonstrated superior performance in graph learning tasks. However, learning from global interactions can be challenging due to the large number of nodes. In this paper, we discover a new phenomenon termed overaggregating. Over-aggregating arises when a large volume of messages is aggregated into a single node with less discrimination, leading to the dilution of the key messages and potential information loss. To address this, we propose Wideformer, a plug-and-play method for graph attention. Wideformer divides the aggregation of all nodes into parallel processes and guides the model to focus on specific subsets of these processes. The division can limit the input volume per aggregation, avoiding message dilution and reducing information loss.

Transformer-based language models exhibit complex and distributed behavior, yet their internal computations remain poorly understood. Existing mechanistic interpretability methods typically treat attention heads and multilayer perceptron layers (MLPs) (the building blocks of a transformer architecture) as indivisible units, overlooking possibilities of functional substructure learned within them. In this work, we introduce a more fine-grained perspective that decomposes these components into orthogonal singular directions, revealing superposed and independent computations within a single head or MLP. We validate our perspective on widely used standard tasks like Indirect Object Identification (IOI), Gender Pronoun (GP), and Greater Than (GT), showing that previously identified canonical functional heads, such as the "name mover," encode multiple overlapping subfunctions aligned with distinct singular directions. Nodes in a computational graph, that are previously identified as circuit elements show strong activation along specific low-rank directions, suggesting that meaningful computations reside in compact subspaces. While some directions remain challenging to interpret fully, our results highlight that transformer computations are more distributed, structured, and compositional than previously assumed. This perspective opens new avenues for fine-grained mechanistic interpretability and a deeper understanding of model internals.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically process a large number of visual tokens, leading to considerable computational overhead, even though many of these tokens are redundant. Existing visual token pruning methods primarily focus on selecting the most salient tokens based on attention scores, resulting in the semantic incompleteness of the selected tokens. In this paper, we propose a novel visual token pruning strategy, called Saliency-Coverage Oriented token Pruning for Efficient MLLMs (SCOPE), to jointly model both the saliency and coverage of the selected visual tokens to better preserve semantic completeness. Specifically, we introduce a set-coverage for a given set of selected tokens, computed based on the token relationships. We then define a token-coverage gain for each unselected token, quantifying how much additional coverage would be obtained by including it. By integrating the saliency score into the token-coverage gain, we propose our SCOPE score and iteratively select the token with the highest SCOPE score. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple vision-language understanding benchmarks using the LLaVA-1.5 and LLaVA-Next models. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/kinredon/SCOPE.

Deep neural networks are increasingly applied in automated histopathology. Yet, whole-slide images (WSIs) are often acquired at gigapixel sizes, rendering them computationally infeasible to analyze entirely at high resolution. Diagnostic labels are largely available only at the slide-level, because expert annotation of images at a finer (patch) level is both laborious and expensive. Moreover, regions with diagnostic information typically occupy only a small fraction of the WSI, making it inefficient to examine the entire slide at full resolution. Here, we propose SASHA - Sequential Attention-based Sampling for Histopathological Analysis - a deep reinforcement learning approach for efficient analysis of histopathological images.

With the development of large language models (LLMs), efficient inference through Key-Value (KV) cache compression has attracted considerable attention, especially for long-context generation. To compress the KV cache, recent methods identify critical KV tokens through static modeling of attention scores. However, these methods often struggle to accurately determine critical tokens as they neglect the temporal patterns in attention scores, resulting in a noticeable degradation in LLM performance. To address this challenge, we propose AttentionPredictor, which is the first learning-based method to directly predict attention patterns for KV cache compression and critical token identification. Specifically, AttentionPredictor learns a lightweight, unified convolution model to dynamically capture spatiotemporal patterns and predict the next-token attention scores. An appealing feature of AttentionPredictor is that it accurately predicts the attention score and shares the unified prediction model, which consumes negligible memory, among all transformer layers. Moreover, we propose a cross-token critical cache prefetching framework that hides the token estimation time overhead to accelerate the decoding stage. By retaining most of the attention information, AttentionPredictor achieves 13 KV cache compression and 5.6 speedup in a cache offloading scenario with comparable LLM performance, significantly outperforming the stateof-the-arts.

Long-form video understanding poses a significant challenge for video large language models (VideoLLMs) due to prohibitively high computational and memory demands. In this paper, We propose FlexSelect, a flexible and efficient token selection strategy for processing long videos. FlexSelect identifies and retains the most semantically relevant content by leveraging cross-modal attention patterns from a reference transformer layer. It comprises two key components: (1) a training-free token ranking pipeline that leverages faithful cross-modal attention weights to estimate each video token's importance, and (2) a rank-supervised lightweight selector that is trained to replicate these rankings and filter redundant tokens. This generic approach can be seamlessly integrated into various VideoLLM architectures, such as LLaVA-Video, InternVL and Qwen-VL, serving as a plug-and-play module to extend their temporal context length. Empirically, FlexSelect delivers strong gains across multiple long-video benchmarks - including VideoMME, MLVU, LongVB, and LVBench. Morever, it achieves significant speed-ups (e.g., up to 9 on a LLaVA-Video-7B model), highlighting FlexSelect's promise for efficient long-form video understanding.

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs [1] and Highway Networks [2] to recent state space models [3], linear attention [4], and also softmax attention [5, 6]. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of gating. In this work, we conduct comprehensive experiments to systematically investigate gating-augmented softmax attention variants. Specifically, we perform a comprehensive comparison over 30 variants of 15BMixture-of-Experts (MoE) models and 1.7B dense models trained on a 3.5 trillion token dataset. Our central finding is that a simple modification--applying an head-specific sigmoid gate after the Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA)--consistently improves performance. This modification also enhances training stability, tolerates larger learning rates, and improves scaling properties. By comparing various gating positions and computational variants, we attribute this effectiveness to two key factors: (1) introducing non-linearity upon the low-rank mapping in the softmax attention, and (2) applying query-dependent sparse gating scores to modulate the SDPA output. Notably, we find this sparse gating mechanism mitigates'massive activation' [7], 'attention sink' [8], and enhances long-context extrapolation performance, and we also release related codes and models to facilitate future research. Furthermore, the most effective SDPA output gating is used in the Qwen3-Next models.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) excel at multimodal understanding but suffer from high computational costs due to redundant vision tokens. Existing pruning methods typically rely on single-layer attention scores to rank and prune redundant visual tokens to solve this inefficiency. However, as the interaction between tokens and layers is complicated, this raises a basic question: Is such a simple single-layer criterion sufficient to identify redundancy? To answer this question, we rethink the emergence of redundant visual tokens from a fundamental perspective: information flow, which models the interaction between tokens and layers by capturing how information moves between tokens across layers. We find (1) the CLS token acts as an information relay, which can simplify the complicated flow analysis; (2) the redundancy emerges progressively and dynamically via layer-wise attention concentration; and (3) relying solely on attention scores from single layers can lead to contradictory redundancy identification. Based on this, we propose FlowCut, an information-flow-aware pruning framework, mitigating the insufficiency of the current criterion for identifying redundant tokens and better aligning with the model's inherent behaviors. Extensive experiments show that FlowCut achieves superior results, outperforming SoTA by 1.6% on LLaVA-1.57B with 88.9% token reduction, and by 4.3% on LLaVA-NeXT-7B with 94.4% reduction, delivering 3.2 speed-up in the prefilling stage.