Balancing Saliency and Coverage: Semantic Prominence-Aware Budgeting for Visual Token Compression in VLMs

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong multimodal understanding capabilities by leveraging high-resolution visual inputs, but the resulting large number of visual tokens creates a major computational bottleneck. Recent work mitigates this issue through visual token compression, typically compressing tokens based on saliency, diversity, or a fixed combination of both. We observe that the distribution of semantic prominence varies substantially across samples, leading to different optimal trade-offs between local saliency preservation and global coverage. This observation suggests that applying a static compression strategy across all samples can be suboptimal. Motivated by this insight, we propose PromPrune, a sample-adaptive visual token selection framework composed of semantic prominence-aware budget allocation and a two-stage selection pipeline. Our method adaptively balances local saliency preservation and global coverage according to the semantic prominence distribution of each sample. By allocating token budgets between locally salient regions and globally diverse regions, our method maintains strong performance even under high compression ratios. On LLaVA-NeXT-7B, our approach reduces FLOPs by 88% and prefill latency by 22% while preserving 97.5% of the original accuracy.

Mirroring the Mind: Distilling Human-Like Metacognitive Strategies into Large Language Models

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often exhibit structural fragility in complex reasoning tasks, failing to produce correct answers even after successfully deriving valid intermediate steps. Through systematic analysis, we observe that these failures frequently stem not from a lack of reasoning capacity, but from a deficiency in self-regulatory control, where valid logic is destabilized by uncontrolled exploration or the failure to recognize logical sufficiency. Motivated by this observation, we propose Metacognitive Behavioral Tuning (MBT), a post-training framework that explicitly injects metacognitive behaviors into the model's thought process. MBT implements this via two complementary formulations: (1) MBT-S, which synthesizes rigorous reasoning traces from scratch, and (2) MBT-R, which rewrites the student's initial traces to stabilize intrinsic exploration patterns. Experiments across multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that MBT consistently outperforms baselines, achieving notable gains on challenging benchmarks. By effectively eliminating reasoning collapse, MBT achieves higher accuracy with significantly reduced token consumption, demonstrating that internalizing metacognitive strategies leads to more stable and robust reasoning.

Visual Attention Never Fades: Selective Progressive Attention ReCalibration for Detailed Image Captioning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Detailed image captioning is essential for tasks like data generation and aiding visually impaired individuals. High-quality captions require a balance between precision and recall, which remains challenging for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In this work, we hypothesize that this limitation stems from weakening and increasingly noisy visual attention as responses lengthen. To address this issue, we propose SPARC (Selective Progressive Attention ReCalibration), a training-free method that enhances the contribution of visual tokens during decoding. SPARC is founded on three key observations: (1) increasing the influence of all visual tokens reduces recall; thus, SPARC selectively amplifies visual tokens; (2) as captions lengthen, visual attention becomes noisier, so SPARC identifies critical visual tokens by leveraging attention differences across time steps; (3) as visual attention gradually weakens, SPARC reinforces it to preserve its influence. Our experiments, incorporating both automated and human evaluations, demonstrate that existing methods improve the precision of MLLMs at the cost of recall. In contrast, our proposed method enhances both precision and recall with minimal computational overhead.