aiqbench analysis
This research addresses a critical inefficiency in diffusion-based multimodal large language models by introducing Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Decoding (VRCD). The method quantifies overlapping visual grounding among parallel tokens using a new Visual Redundancy Index and prioritizes complementary positions during inference without requiring additional training. Consequently, VRCD significantly reduces entropy and boosts accuracy on benchmarks like M^3CoT while maintaining modest computational overhead.
Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Parallel Decoding for Diffusion-Based Multimodal Large Language Models
arXiv:2605.25820v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iteratively predicting tokens at multiple masked positions in parallel. This turns each decoding step into a position-selection problem: the model must choose not only which predictions are reliable in isolation, but also which positions should be committed together as context for later decoding steps. Existing confidence-based decoding ranks masked positions independently and commits the top-K positions, largely ignoring whether the committed tokens provide complementary visual grounding. We identify a step-level limitation of this strategy in multimodal settings: high-confidence tokens selected in the same step can rely on overlapping visual grounding, introducing visual redundancy among the committed tokens and leaving less complementary visual grounding available for later decoding. To quantify this effect, we introduce the Visual Redundancy Index (VRI), which measures visual grounding overlap among tokens committed in parallel. To control this redundancy during decoding, we propose Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Decoding (VRCD), a training-free inference-time decoding method that uses token-to-image attention to prioritize visually complementary positions. Across diverse multimodal benchmarks, VRCD reduces visual redundancy and remaining-position entropy with modest runtime overhead. In longer decoding experiments, it also achieves relative accuracy gains of up to 18.8% on M^3CoT and 6.9% on MMBench over confidence-based decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/infiniteYuanyl/VRCD.
Abstract:Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iteratively predicting tokens at multiple masked positions in parallel. This turns each decoding step into a position-selection problem: the model must choose not only which predictions are reliable in isolation, but also which positions should be committed together as context for later decoding steps. Existing confidence-based decoding ranks masked positions independently and commits the top-K positions, largely ignoring whether the committed tokens provide complementary visual grounding. We identify a step-level limitation of this strategy in multimodal settings: high-confidence tokens selected in the same step can rely on overlapping visual grounding, introducing visual redundancy among the committed tokens and leaving less complementary visual grounding available for later decoding. To quantify this effect, we introduce the Visual Redundancy Index (VRI), which measures visual grounding overlap among tokens committed in parallel. To control this redundancy during decoding, we propose Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Decoding (VRCD), a training-free inference-time decoding method that uses token-to-image attention to prioritize visually complementary positions. Across diverse multimodal benchmarks, VRCD reduces visual redundancy and remaining-position entropy with modest runtime overhead. In longer decoding experiments, it also achieves relative accuracy gains of up to 18.8% on M^3CoT and 6.9% on MMBench over confidence-based decoding. Code is available at this https URL.
23 pages, 7 figures, preprint. Code is available at this https URL
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2605.25820 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2605.25820v3 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.25820 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 310 words