English

InfiniteVL: Synergizing Linear and Sparse Attention for Highly-Efficient, Unlimited-Input Vision-Language Models

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-01 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly tasked with ultra-long multimodal understanding. While linear architectures offer constant computation and memory footprints, they often struggle with high-frequency visual perception compared to standard Transformers. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{InfiniteVL}. We first develop a hybrid base model called \textbf{InfiniteVL-Base} that interleaves a small fraction of Full Attention layers with Gated DeltaNet. Empowered by a tailored distillation and fine-tuning strategy, InfiniteVL-Base matches the fundamental multimodal performance of equivalent Transformers while achieving a \textbf{1.7×\times} decoding speedup. However, the quadratic complexity of the retained Full Attention inevitably becomes an efficiency bottleneck when scaling to ultra long context. To break this barrier, we propose a novel Long-Sequence Architectural Fine-Tuning strategy that seamlessly transforms the dense attention into vision-specific sparse mechanisms. This yields two specialized variants: \textbf{InfiniteVL-Offline} for offline retrieval and \textbf{InfiniteVL-Online} for online streaming. By eliminating the computation explosion of global attention without sacrificing high-frequency visual recall, InfiniteVL-Offline achieves Transformer-level length generalization with a \textbf{5x} prefill acceleration at 256K context. Concurrently, InfiniteVL-Online delivers robust streaming perception with a constant memory footprint and a real-time throughput of \textbf{25} FPS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/InfiniteVL.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.08829,
  title  = {InfiniteVL: Synergizing Linear and Sparse Attention for Highly-Efficient, Unlimited-Input Vision-Language Models},
  author = {Hongyuan Tao and Bencheng Liao and Shaoyu Chen and Haoran Yin and Qian Zhang and Wenyu Liu and Xinggang Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.08829},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

20 pages, 8 figures, conference or other essential info

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:17:27.548Z