Non-autoregressive Sequence-to-Sequence Vision-Language Models
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Visual token pruning and efficiency
Abstract (arXiv)
Sequence-to-sequence vision-language models are showing promise, but their applicability is limited by their inference latency due to their autoregressive way of generating predictions. We propose a parallel decoding sequence-to-sequence vision-language model, trained with a Query-CTC loss, that marginalizes over multiple inference paths in the decoder. This allows us to model the joint distribution of tokens, rather than restricting to conditional distribution as in an autoregressive model. The resulting model, NARVL, achieves performance on-par with its state-of-the-art autoregressive counterpart, but is faster at inference time, reducing from the linear complexity associated with the sequential generation of tokens to a paradigm of constant time joint inference.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Visual token pruning and efficiency, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 46 of its 59 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2024.
Builds on
46 of 59 references.
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34 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 3; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.
5 papers.
- 2024Enhancing Vision-Language Pre-training with Rich Supervisionscited by 12
- 2024Do Prompts Really Prompt? Exploring the Prompt Understanding Capability of Whispercited by 12
- 2025Ask and Remember: A Questions-Only Replay Strategy for Continual Visual Question Answeringcited by 7
- 2024COrAL: Order-Agnostic Language Modeling for Efficient Iterative Refinementcited by 3
- 2026Efficient Document Parsing via Parallel Token Predictioncited by 2
- 2026Efficient Document Parsing via Parallel Token Prediction16 Mar 2026
- 2025Ask and Remember: A Questions-Only Replay Strategy for Continual Visual Question Answering6 Feb 2025
- 2024COrAL: Order-Agnostic Language Modeling for Efficient Iterative Refinement12 Oct 2024
- 2024Do Prompts Really Prompt? Exploring the Prompt Understanding Capability of Whisper9 Jun 2024
- 2024Enhancing Vision-Language Pre-training with Rich Supervisions5 Mar 2024
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
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- 2025SpecVLM: Fast Speculative Decoding in Vision-Language Models
- 2025FastVLM: Self-Speculative Decoding for Fast Vision-Language Model Inference
- 2024Masked AutoDecoder is Effective Multi-Task Vision Generalist
- 2025DiffusionVL: Translating Any Autoregressive Models into Diffusion Vision Language Models
- 2025HiViS: Hiding Visual Tokens from the Drafter for Speculative Decoding in Vision-Language Models
- 2026MMSpec: Benchmarking Speculative Decoding for Vision-Language Models
- 2026Beyond Tokens: A Survey on Decoding Methods for Large Language and Vision-Language Models