When Do Fewer Visual Tokens Accelerate Multimodal Inference? A Break-Even Study Across Decision Locations and Hardware
Fewer visual tokens do not guarantee lower end-to-end latency. We evaluate break-even with a reproducible protocol that accounts for decision overhead, shared work, and the operators each policy can avoid. A stage-level decomposition reconciles these components with measured end-to-end latency. In a 30-example pilot, the two tested autoregressive probes remain slower than Full despite state reuse. A lightweight post-vision predictor yields paired confidence intervals below zero on RTX 3090 and A100 and remains significant after a conservative all-pairs Holm correction. A pre-vision image-size rule also yields intervals below zero on both GPUs, although neither comparison remains significa...
| Authors | Hao Dou, Ruiwen Tian |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 4 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 August 2026 |
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