AdaptMerge: Inference Time Adaptive Visual and Language-Guided Token Merging for Efficient Large Multimodal Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent advances in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have showcased impressive visual understanding and vision-language reasoning capabilities, yet their computational cost hinders practical deployment, especially in resourceconstrained settings.A key bottleneck is the large number of visual tokens generated by its vision encoders, which increases latency and memory demands.Existing token reduction methods often require costly fine-tuning or apply fixed token reduction ratios, ignoring image complexity and vision-language interactions.We propose AdaptMerge, a trainingfree, inference-time token merging strategy that adaptively reduces visual tokens by leveraging feature diversity and language-guided relevance.By dynamically adjusting to image complexity and ensuring multimodal coherence, AdaptMerge significantly lowers floating-point operations while improving performance.Extensive experiments on Google's latest Gemma 3 models (4B and 12B parameters) across four challenging benchmarks demonstrate that AdaptMerge outperforms state-of-the-art token reduction techniques, achieving both reduced computational costs and improved performance, thereby providing a practical pathway to more efficient LMMs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".