Alaa Eddine Mazouz | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

TORINO: Token Reduction via Interpretable Concept Overlap in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across different tasks, but their computational cost is dominated by the large number of visual tokens fed to the language model. Existing token reduction methods rely on attention-based scores or pairwise similarity, without an explicit semantic representation of each token. We introduce TORINO (TOken Reduction via Interpretable coNcept Overlap), a plug-and-play framework for adaptive visual token reduction in VLMs that requires no fine-tuning of the underlying model. TORINO leverages Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to project visual tokens into an interpretable latent space where token relationships can be analyzed through shared concept activations. Specifically, we define concept overlap as the degree of agreement between active SAE latents and use it to group tokens that share semantic content. Reduction within each group is then performed by either pruning or merging, providing a unified framework that preserves semantically important visual information while removing redundancy. Unlike fixed-budget approaches, TORINO dynamically adapts the reduction rate to input complexity, allowing different images to retain different numbers of tokens. Experiments across multiple vision-language benchmarks show that TORINO achieves favorable efficiency-accuracy trade-offs, reducing the number of visual tokens with minimal performance loss.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Learned Image Compression Through Knowledge Distillation

Learned image compression sits at the intersection of machine learning and image processing. With advances in deep learning, neural network-based compression methods have emerged. In this process, an encoder maps the image to a low-dimensional latent space, which is then quantized, entropy-coded into a binary bitstream, and transmitted to the receiver. At the receiver end, the bitstream is entropy-decoded, and a decoder reconstructs an approximation of the original image. Recent research suggests that these models consistently outperform conventional codecs. However, they require significant processing power, making them unsuitable for real-time use on resource-constrained platforms, which hinders their deployment in mainstream applications. This study aims to reduce the resource requirements of neural networks used for image compression by leveraging knowledge distillation, a training paradigm where smaller neural networks, partially trained on the outputs of larger, more complex models, can achieve better performance than when trained independently. Our work demonstrates that knowledge distillation can be effectively applied to image compression tasks: i) across various architecture sizes, ii) to achieve different image quality/bit rate tradeoffs, and iii) to save processing and energy resources. This approach introduces new settings and hyperparameters, and future research could explore the impact of different teacher models, as well as alternative loss functions. Knowledge distillation could also be extended to transformer-based models. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/FABallemand/PRIM .

cs.CV↗