# DVTR-KD: Distilling Vision-Language Models via Intermediate Visual Token Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17853 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17853/

## 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 32 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Visual token pruning and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/visual-token-pruning-and-efficiency/)
- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Visual token pruning in multimodal models](https://mlsanity.com/inference/visual-token-pruning-in-multimodal-models/)
- Knowledge distillation / [Multimodal distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/multimodal-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07396/) (2016)
- [OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07895/) (2023)
- [DistiLLM: Towards Streamlined Distillation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03898/) (2024)
- [InternLM-XComposer2-4KHD: A Pioneering Large Vision-Language Model Handling Resolutions from 336 Pixels to 4K HD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06512/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-KD: A Framework of Distilling Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16236/) (2024)
- [Align-KD: Distilling Cross-Modal Alignment Knowledge for Mobile Vision-Language Model Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01282/) (2024)
- [EM-KD: Distilling Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model with Unbalanced Vision Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21106/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-UHD v3: Progressive Visual Compression for Efficient Native-Resolution Encoding in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21150/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on diverse vision-language tasks, but their computational demands limit deployment under constrained budgets, particularly on edge devices. Many works focus on Knowledge Distillation (KD) and try to transfer knowledge from powerful teacher models to students. In addition to reducing model size, visual token compression provides a complementary route to efficiency, but introduces mismatched visual token counts that complicate direct token-wise knowledge transfer. To mitigate this, we propose DVTR-KD, a knowledge distillation framework based on Dense Visual Token Reconstruction, which reconstructs the teacher's dense visual tokens from the student's compressed tokens. We reconstruct visual states after the final LLM layer and at the input to an intermediate layer identified as important for visual-information readout. At the intermediate layer, reconstruction is supervised through the teacher's response predictions rather than by direct token-wise KL or MSE matching. An auxiliary attention-readout loss complements this response-level supervision by aligning how the student and the original teacher integrate contextual information when predicting responses. Evaluations on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that DVTR-KD improves the performance of token-compressed students while retaining the inference efficiency afforded by visual token compression.