RUTA: Principled Visual Token Allocation via Rate-Utility Optimization
arXiv:2608.04132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-resolution images and long videos provide vision-language models with rich context for multimodal reasoning and fine-grained perception, but the resulting long visual token sequences make large language model-side computation and memory costly. Existing visual token reducers often operate at prescribed rates, while recent methods adapt token counts across inputs using method-specific learned thresholds or importance predictors. We introduce RUTA, a principled Rate-Utility Token Allocation method that performs pre-LLM reduction by jointly learning which tokens to retain and how many to allocate to each image-query pair. RUTA constructs query-conditioned candidate tokens and predicts a retention probability for each candidate. During training, these probabilities parameterize independent Bernoulli gates, while their sum provides a differentiable training-time estimate of the token count for each pair. Retained tokens serve as anchors that aggregate information from non-retained tokens according to semantic affinity and spatial proximity. RUTA is optimized with a penalized rate-utility objective that balances downstream task loss against expected token usage. Averaged across five benchmarks and measured relative to each backbone's full-token baseline, RUTA uses only $2.0\%$ and $4.2\%$ of visual tokens while preserving $88.2\%$ and $94.4\%$ of task performance on LLaVA-NeXT-7B and Qwen3-VL-8B, respectively.
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[Submitted on 4 Aug 2026]
Title:RUTA: Principled Visual Token Allocation via Rate-Utility Optimization
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Abstract:High-resolution images and long videos provide vision-language models with rich context for multimodal reasoning and fine-grained perception, but the resulting long visual token sequences make large language model-side computation and memory costly. Existing visual token reducers often operate at prescribed rates, while recent methods adapt token counts across inputs using method-specific learned thresholds or importance predictors. We introduce RUTA, a principled Rate-Utility Token Allocation method that performs pre-LLM reduction by jointly learning which tokens to retain and how many to allocate to each image-query pair. RUTA constructs query-conditioned candidate tokens and predicts a retention probability for each candidate. During training, these probabilities parameterize independent Bernoulli gates, while their sum provides a differentiable training-time estimate of the token count for each pair. Retained tokens serve as anchors that aggregate information from non-retained tokens according to semantic affinity and spatial proximity. RUTA is optimized with a penalized rate-utility objective that balances downstream task loss against expected token usage. Averaged across five benchmarks and measured relative to each backbone's full-token baseline, RUTA uses only $2.0\%$ and $4.2\%$ of visual tokens while preserving $88.2\%$ and $94.4\%$ of task performance on LLaVA-NeXT-7B and Qwen3-VL-8B, respectively.
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.04132 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2608.04132v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.04132
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Jian Zou [view email] [v1] Tue, 4 Aug 2026 18:37:26 UTC (2,425 KB)
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