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QSVD: Efficient Low-rank Approximation for Unified Query-Key-Value Weight Compression in Low-Precision Vision-Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are integral to tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering, but their high computational cost, driven by large memory footprints and processing time, limits their scalability and real-time applicability. In this work, we propose leveraging Singular-Value Decomposition (SVD) over the joint query (Q), key (K), and value (V) weight matrices to reduce KV cache size and computational overhead. We in addition introduce an efficient rank allocation strategy that dynamically adjusts the SVD rank based on its impact on VLM accuracy, achieving a significant reduction in both memory usage and computational cost. Finally, we extend this approach by applying quantization to both VLM weights and activations, resulting in a highly efficient VLM.


EDBench: Large-Scale Electron Density Data for Molecular Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing molecular machine learning force fields (MLFFs) generally focus on the learning of atoms, molecules, and simple quantum chemical properties (such as energy and force), but ignore the importance of electron density (ED) ρ(r) in accurately understanding molecular force fields (MFFs). ED describes the probability of finding electrons at specific locations around atoms or molecules, which uniquely determines all ground state properties (such as energy, molecular structure, etc.) of interactive multi-particle systems according to the HohenbergKohn theorem. However, the calculation of ED relies on the time-consuming first-principles density functional theory (DFT), which leads to the lack of largescale ED data and limits its application in MLFFs. In this paper, we introduce EDBench, a large-scale, high-quality dataset of ED designed to advance learningbased research at the electronic scale. Built upon the PCQM4Mv2, EDBench provides accurate ED data, covering 3.3 million molecules. To comprehensively evaluate the ability of models to understand and utilize electronic information, we design a suite of ED-centric benchmark tasks spanning prediction, retrieval, and generation. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that learning from EDBench is not only feasible but also achieves high accuracy. Moreover, we show that learning-based methods can efficiently calculate ED with comparable precision while significantly reducing the computational cost relative to traditional DFT calculations. All data and benchmarks from EDBench will be freely available, laying a robust foundation for ED-driven drug discovery and materials science.


Degrees of Freedom for Linear Attention: Distilling Softmax Attention with Optimal Feature Efficiency

Neural Information Processing Systems

Linear attention has attracted interest as a computationally efficient approximation to softmax attention, especially for long sequences. Recent studies have explored distilling softmax attention in pre-trained Transformers into linear attention. However, a critical challenge remains: how to choose the feature dimension that governs the approximation quality. Existing methods fix this dimension uniformly across all attention layers, overlooking the diverse roles and complexities of them. In this paper, we propose a principled method to automatically determine the feature dimension in linear attention using the concept of statistical degrees of freedom, which represent the effective dimensionality of the inputs. We provide a theoretical bound on the approximation error and show that the dimension chosen by our method achieves smaller errors under a fixed computational budget. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient layerwise training strategy to learn nonlinear features tailored to each layer. Experiments on multiple pre-trained transformers demonstrate that our method improves the performance of distilled models compared to baselines without increasing the inference cost. Our findings also provide insight into how the complexity of the attention mechanism evolves across layers.


MobileODE: An Extra Lightweight Network

Neural Information Processing Systems

Depthwise-separable convolution has emerged as a significant milestone in the lightweight development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) over the past decade. This technique consists of two key components: depthwise convolution, which captures spatial information, and pointwise convolution, which enhances channel interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel method to lightweight CNNs through the discretization of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). Specifically, we optimize depthwise-separable convolution by replacing the pointwise convolution with a discrete ODE module, termed the Channelwise ODESolver (COS). The COS module is constructed by a simple yet efficient direct differentiation Euler algorithm, using learnable increment parameters. This replacement reduces parameters by over 98.36% compared to conventional pointwise convolution. By integrating COS into MobileNet, we develop a new extra lightweight network called MobileODE. With carefully designed basic and inverse residual blocks, the resulting MobileODEV1 and MobileODEV2 reduce channel interaction parameters by 71.0% and 69.2%, respectively, compared to MobileNetV1, while achieving higher accuracy across various tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation.


Tensor Decomposition Networks for Fast Machine Learning Interatomic Potential Computations

Neural Information Processing Systems

SO(3)-equivariant networks are the dominant models for machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs). The key operation of such networks is the ClebschGordan (CG) tensor product, which is computationally expensive. To accelerate the computation, we develop tensor decomposition networks (TDNs) as a class of approximately equivariant networks in which CG tensor products are replaced by low-rank tensor decompositions, such as the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition. With the CP decomposition, we prove (i) a uniform bound on the induced error of SO(3)-equivariance, and (ii) the universality of approximating any equivariant bilinear map. To further reduce the number of parameters, we propose path-weight sharing that ties all multiplicity-space weights across the O(L3)CG paths into a single shared parameter set without compromising equivariance, where L is the maximum angular degree.


37664246a1e07e212ddacea6e5a523f2-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Process reward models (PRMs) play a central role in guiding inference-time scaling algorithms for large language models (LLMs). However, we observe that even stateof-the-art PRMs can be poorly calibrated. Specifically, they tend to overestimate the success probability that a partial reasoning step will lead to a correct final answer, particularly when smaller LLMs are used to complete the reasoning trajectory. To address this, we present a calibration approach--performed via quantile regression-- that adjusts PRM outputs to better align with true success probabilities. Leveraging these calibrated success estimates and their associated confidence bounds, we introduce an instance-adaptive scaling (IAS) framework that dynamically adjusts the compute budget based on the estimated likelihood that a partial reasoning trajectory will yield a correct final answer. Unlike conventional methods that allocate a fixed number of reasoning trajectories per query, this approach adapts to each instance and reasoning step when using our calibrated PRMs. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that (i) our PRM calibration method achieves small calibration error, outperforming the baseline methods, (ii) calibration is crucial for enabling effective IAS, and (iii) the proposed IAS strategy reduces inference costs while maintaining final answer accuracy, utilizing less compute on more confident problems as desired.


Frequency-Aware Token Reduction for Efficient Vision Transformer

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision Transformers have demonstrated exceptional performance across various computer vision tasks, yet their quadratic computational complexity concerning token length remains a significant challenge. To address this, token reduction methods have been widely explored. However, existing approaches often overlook the frequency characteristics of self-attention, such as rank collapsing and over-smoothing phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a frequency-aware token reduction strategy that improves computational efficiency while preserving performance by mitigating rank collapsing.


FLAME: Fast Long-context Adaptive Memory for Event-based Vision

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose Fast Long-context Adaptive Memory for Event (FLAME), a novel scalable architecture that combines neuro-inspired feature extraction with robust structured sequence modeling to efficiently process asynchronous and sparse event camera data. As a departure from conventional input encoding methods, FLAME presents Event Attention Layer, a novel feature extractor that leverages neuromorphic dynamics (Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF)) to directly capture multi-timescale features from event streams. The feature extractor integrates with a structured state-space model with a novel Event-Aware HiPPO (EA-HiPPO) mechanism that dynamically adapts memory retention based on inter-event intervals to understand relationship across varying temporal scales and event sequences. ANormal Plus Low Rank (NPLR) decomposition reduces the computational complexity of state update from O(N2) to O(Nr), where N represents the dimension of the core state vector and r is the rank of a low-rank component (with r N). FLAME demonstrates state-of-the-art accuracy for event-by-event processing on complex event camera datasets.



VCM: Vision Concept Modeling with Adaptive Vision Token Compression via Instruction Fine-Tuning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have emerged as foundational tools for real-world AI applications. Despite their remarkable capabilities, current LVLMs process entire images at the token level, leading to significant inefficiencies compared to human cognition, which selectively focuses on high-level vision concepts. This token-level redundancy becomes increasingly problematic for high-resolution images and long video sequences, resulting in large computational costs and limited scalability in practical applications. To address this limitation, we introduce the concept of a vision concept model, a novel paradigm that enables LVLMs to dynamically extract the most relevant vision concepts from complex inputs, based on task-specific instructions. To optimize this vision concept modeling process, we propose VCM, a self-supervised framework that leverages vision-language correlations across diverse instances. VCM is designed to learn meaningful vision concepts without the need for expensive concept-level annotations. At its core, it employs a forward-backward optimization algorithm that supports LVLMs to adjust concept granularity and spatial alignment dynamically. Experiments demonstrate that VCM remarkably reduces computational costs (e.g., achieving up to 85\% fewer FLOPs for LLaVA-1.5-7B), while maintaining strong performance across a series of vision-language tasks.