# OmniRoute: Mapping Temporal Semantic Evidence to Audio-Visual Token Budgets for Efficient Omnimodal Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37052 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37052/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio-language model reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 15 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Audio-language model reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/audio-language-model-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17765/) (2025)
- [Qwen3.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15804/) (2026)
- [WorldSense: Evaluating Real-world Omnimodal Understanding for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04326/) (2025)
- [Daily-Omni: Towards Audio-Visual Reasoning with Temporal Alignment across Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17862/) (2025)
- [OmniVinci: Enhancing Architecture and Data for Omni-Modal Understanding LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15870/) (2025)
- [InteractiveOmni: A Unified Omni-modal Model for Audio-Visual Multi-turn Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13747/) (2025)
- [OmniZip: Audio-Guided Dynamic Token Compression for Fast Omnimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14582/) (2025)
- [FastAV: Efficient Token Pruning for Audio-Visual Large Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13143/) (2026)
- [EchoingPixels: Aliasing-Resistant Joint Token Reduction for Audio-Visual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10324/) (2025)
- [OmniDrop: Layer-wise Token Pruning for Omni-modal LLMs via Query-Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14458/) (2026)
- [OmniSelect: Dynamic Modality-Aware Token Compression for Efficient Omni-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18041/) (2026)
- [OmniMem: Perturbation-aware Memory Compression for Streaming Audio-Visual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07577/) (2026)
- [OmniRefine: Alignment-Aware Cooperative Compression for Efficient Omnimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12056/) (2026)
- [AVOC: Enhancing Hour-Level Audio-Video Understanding in Omni-Modal LLMs via Retrieval-Inspired Token Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24286/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Omnimodal large language models (Omni-LLMs) encode audio and visual streams into temporally interleaved token sequences for multimodal reasoning. However, processing long audio-visual token sequences incurs substantial prefill costs. Existing compression methods have made progress, but often overlook temporal changes in audio-visual semantic relevance. Motivated by temporal variation and local continuity, we propose OmniRoute, a training-free, two-stage compression framework. First, Temporal Evidence-Guided Budgeting (TEGB) derives chunk-wise modality preferences and initial leading-modality budgets from semantic relevance and local content variation. Second, Budget-Constrained Semantic Compression (BCSC) compresses the leading modality and then calibrates the follower's retention target using the actual retained fraction. For video, it combines spatiotemporal grouping with query-guided selection; for audio, it selects tokens based on encoder attention and query relevance, then merges residual tokens into context anchors under visual guidance. Experiments on four representative benchmarks demonstrate a better trade-off between inference efficiency and performance than competitive baselines. The code and interface will be released to facilitate further research.