Cross-attention transformers and other multimodal vision-language models excel at grounding and generation; however, their extensive, full-precision backbones make it challenging to deploy them on edge devices. Memory-augmented architectures enhance the utilization of past context; however, most works rarely pair them with aggressive edge-oriented quantization. We introduce BitMar, a quantized multimodal transformer that proposes an external human-like episodic memory for effective image-text generation on hardware with limited resources. BitMar utilizes 1.58-bit encoders, one for text (BitNet-style) and one for vision (DiNOv2-based), to create compact embeddings that are combined and used to query a fixed-size key-value episodic memory. During vector retrieval, the BitNet decoder applies per-layer conditioning, which increases the contextual relevance of generated content. The decoder also employs attention sinks with a sliding-window mechanism to process long or streaming inputs under tight memory budgets. The combination of per-layer conditioning and sliding-window attention achieves a strong quality-speed trade-off, delivering competitive captioning and multimodal understanding at low latency with a small model footprint. These characteristics make BitMar well-suited for edge deployment.
@article{arxiv.2510.10560,
title = {BitMar: Low-Bit Multimodal Fusion with Episodic Memory for Edge Devices},
author = {Euhid Aman and Esteban Carlin and Hsing-Kuo Pao and Giovanni Beltrame and Ghaluh Indah Permata Sari and Yie-Tarng Chen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10560},
year = {2025}
}