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arXiv · 2607.28627

ReToken: One Token to Improve Vision-Language Models for Visual Retrieval

Yao Xiao·Reuben Tan·Zhen Zhu·Yuqun Wu·Jianfeng Gao·Derek Hoiem
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Abstract

Long visual context poses a challenge for vision-language models: performance degrades as the number of distractors grows, and processing all tokens at once is computationally infeasible under GPU memory constraints. We present ReToken, a single learnable embedding trained as an explicit retrieval target that selects a sparse set of query-relevant visual tokens from a pre-filled visual KV cache. Trained on only a small image-QA dataset, ReToken yields consistent gains across image and video benchmarks: on Visual Haystacks it improves Qwen3VL-8B by 13.4 points and InternVL3.5 by 12.4 points (>20% relative), and on LVBench it transfers zero-shot to long video for an 8.0-point gain with Qwen3VL-8B. Thanks to its lightweight design, both training and long-video inference fit on a single H100. Code is available at: https://github.com/avaxiao/ReToken

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Yao Xiao, Reuben Tan, Zhen Zhu, Yuqun Wu, Jianfeng Gao, Derek Hoiem. 2026-07-30. ReToken: One Token to Improve Vision-Language Models for Visual Retrieval. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28627

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