# MOSAIC: Adaptive Inter-layer Composition for Efficient Heterogeneous Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09029 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09029/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Visual token pruning and efficiency, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 67 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Visual token pruning and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/visual-token-pruning-and-efficiency/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04434/) (2024)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Success](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19645/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved success using homogeneous Transformers to process multimedia data. Recent studies show that heterogeneous structures interleaving efficient mechanisms, like linear attention, improve both performance and inference latency over homogeneous designs. However, these efforts rely on handcrafted static mixing patterns, which are sub-optimal and difficult to adapt to specific hardware. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-Objective Search for Adaptive Inter-layer Composition (MOSAIC), a hardware-aware search method that automatically transforms homogeneous models into optimized heterogeneous architectures. MOSAIC integrates diverse efficiency mechanisms--including linear, sparse, and low-rank operators--into a unified search space. By formulating the selection as a multi-objective Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problem, our method identifies optimal configurations that maximize downstream performance under strict hardware latency constraints. To mitigate performance degradation from structural transitions, we introduce a two-stage parameter recovery process: global off-policy distillation to stabilize internal representations, followed by a dual-teacher on-policy distillation leveraging a 235B oracle for knowledge expansion and the original 4B teacher for distributional stability. We validate MOSAIC through MOSAIC-4B, derived from Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct. Results demonstrate that MOSAIC-4B matches the baseline's performance across multiple benchmarks while requiring less than 2% of the original training cost. Furthermore, it substantially improves inference efficiency, achieving 1.76x prefilling and 2.54x decoding speedups.