EGM: Efficient Visual Grounding Language Models

Visual grounding is an essential capability of Visual Language Models (VLMs) to understand the real physical world. Previous state-of-the-art grounding visual language models usually have large model sizes, making them heavy for deployment and slow for inference. However, we notice that the sizes of visual encoders are nearly the same for small and large VLMs and the major difference is the sizes of the language models. Small VLMs fall behind larger VLMs in grounding because of the difference in language understanding capability rather than visual information handling. To mitigate the gap, we introduce 'Efficient visual Grounding language Models' (EGM): generate many mid-quality tokens (from small models) to match the performance of large VLMs with few high-quality but expensive tokens. This method is deployment-friendly, and yields better end-to-end latency: On the RefCOCO benchmark, our EGM-Qwen3-VL-8B demonstrates 91.4 IoU with an average of 737ms (5.9x faster) latency while Qwen3-VL-235B demands 4,320ms to reach 90.5 IoU. To validate our approach's generality, we further set up a new amodal grounding setting that requires the model to predict both the visible and occluded parts of the objects. Experiments show our method consistently improves both vanilla and amodal grounding capabilities of small models to match or outperform larger models, thereby improving efficiency for visual grounding.