NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models

Zhijian Liu; Ligeng Zhu; Baifeng Shi; Zhuoyang Zhang; Yuming Lou; Shang Yang; Haocheng Xi; Shiyi Cao; Yuxian Gu; Dacheng Li; Xiuyu Li; Yunhao Fang; Yukang Chen; Cheng-Yu Hsieh; De-An Huang; An-Chieh Cheng; Vishwesh Nath; Jinyi Hu; Sifei Liu; Ranjay Krishna; Daguang Xu; Xiaolong Wang; Pavlo Molchanov; Jan Kautz; Hongxu Yin; Song Han; Yao Lu

arXiv · 2412.04468

NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models

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Abstract

Visual language models (VLMs) have made significant advances in accuracy in recent years. However, their efficiency has received much less attention. This paper introduces NVILA, a family of open VLMs designed to jointly optimize efficiency and accuracy. Building on top of VILA, we improve its model architecture by first scaling up the spatial and temporal resolutions, and then compressing visual tokens. This "scale-then-compress" approach enables NVILA to efficiently process high-resolution images and long videos. We further conduct a systematic investigation that enhances NVILA's efficiency throughout its entire lifecycle, from training and fine-tuning to deployment. NVILA matches or surpasses the accuracy of leading open and proprietary VLMs across a wide range of image and video benchmarks. At the same time, it reduces training cost by 1.9-5.1x, prefilling latency by 1.6-2.2x, and decoding latency by 1.2-2.8x. We release our code and models to facilitate reproducibility.

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Zhijian Liu, Ligeng Zhu, Baifeng Shi, Zhuoyang Zhang, Yuming Lou, Shang Yang, Haocheng Xi, Shiyi Cao, Yuxian Gu, Dacheng Li, Xiuyu Li, Yunhao Fang, Yukang Chen, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, De-An Huang, An-Chieh Cheng, Vishwesh Nath, Jinyi Hu, Sifei Liu, Ranjay Krishna, Daguang Xu, Xiaolong Wang, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Hongxu Yin, Song Han, Yao Lu. 2024-12-05. NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04468

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