Rethinking Practical and Efficient Quantization Calibration for Vision-Language Models

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a primary approach for deploying large language models without fine-tuning, and the quantized performance is often strongly affected by the calibration in PTQ. By contrast, in vision-language models (VLMs), substantial differences between visual and text tokens in their activation distributions and sensitivities to quantization error pose significant challenges for effective calibration during PTQ. In this work, we rethink what PTQ calibration should align with in VLMs and propose the Token-level Importance-aware Layer-wise Quantization framework (TLQ). Guided by gradient information, we design a token-level importance integration mechanism for quantization error, and use it to construct a token-level calibration set, enabling a more fine-grained calibration strategy. Furthermore, TLQ introduces a multi-GPU, quantization-exposed layer-wise calibration scheme. This scheme keeps the layer-wise calibration procedure consistent with the true quantized inference path and distributes the complex layer-wise calibration workload across multiple RTX3090 GPUs, thereby reducing reliance on the large memory of A100 GPUs. TLQ is evaluated across two models, three model scales, and two quantization settings, consistently achieving performance improvements across all settings, indicating its strong quantization stability. The code will be released publicly.

Language Embedding Meets Dynamic Graph: A New Exploration for Neural Architecture Representation Learning

Neural Architecture Representation Learning aims to transform network models into feature representations for predicting network attributes, playing a crucial role in deploying and designing networks for real-world applications. Recently, inspired by the success of transformers, transformer-based models integrated with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved significant progress in representation learning. However, current methods still have some limitations. First, existing methods overlook hardware attribute information, which conflicts with the current trend of diversified deep learning hardware and limits the practical applicability of models. Second, current encoding approaches rely on static adjacency matrices to represent topological structures, failing to capture the structural differences between computational nodes, which ultimately compromises encoding effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce LeDG-Former, an innovative framework that addresses these limitations through the synergistic integration of language-based semantic embedding and dynamic graph representation learning. Specifically, inspired by large language models (LLMs), we propose a language embedding framework where both neural architectures and hardware platform specifications are projected into a unified semantic space through tokenization and LLM processing, enabling zero-shot prediction across different hardware platforms for the first time. Then, we propose a dynamic graph-based transformer for modeling neural architectures, resulting in improved neural architecture modeling performance. On the NNLQP benchmark, LeDG-Former surpasses previous methods, establishing a new SOTA while demonstrating the first successful cross-hardware latency prediction capability. Furthermore, our framework achieves superior performance on the cell-structured NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201 datasets.

OVA-DETR: Open Vocabulary Aerial Object Detection Using Image-Text Alignment and Fusion

Aerial object detection has been a hot topic for many years due to its wide application requirements. However, most existing approaches can only handle predefined categories, which limits their applicability for the open scenarios in real-world. In this paper, we extend aerial object detection to open scenarios by exploiting the relationship between image and text, and propose OVA-DETR, a high-efficiency open-vocabulary detector for aerial images. Specifically, based on the idea of image-text alignment, we propose region-text contrastive loss to replace the category regression loss in the traditional detection framework, which breaks the category limitation. Then, we propose Bidirectional Vision-Language Fusion (Bi-VLF), which includes a dual-attention fusion encoder and a multi-level text-guided Fusion Decoder. The dual-attention fusion encoder enhances the feature extraction process in the encoder part. The multi-level text-guided Fusion Decoder is designed to improve the detection ability for small objects, which frequently appear in aerial object detection scenarios. Experimental results on three widely used benchmark datasets show that our proposed method significantly improves the mAP and recall, while enjoying faster inference speed. For instance, in zero shot detection experiments on DIOR, the proposed OVA-DETR outperforms DescReg and YOLO-World by 37.4% and 33.1%, respectively, while achieving 87 FPS inference speed, which is 7.9x faster than DescReg and 3x faster than YOLO-world. The code is available at https://github.com/GT-Wei/OVA-DETR.