Position Is All You Need: A Free Lunch Token Compression Strategy for MLLM-based Referring Expression Segmentation
Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) aims to generate pixel-wise segmentation masks from complex and implicit textual queries. While recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have substantially boosted RES performance, their prohibitive computational overhead remains a critical bottleneck, which, however, is rarely explored. To fill this gap, we first evaluate typical token compression methods on this task and observe a surprising performance degradation. In this paper, we aim to understand this phenomenon for a solution. By extensive experiments, we find that token compression for RES requires preserving the original position embeddings and local neighboring spatial ...
| Authors | Yuhan Liu, Yixiong Zou, Yuhua Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 26 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 June 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.