Visual language models (VLMs) have made significant advances in accuracy in recent years. However, their efficiency has received much less attention. This paper introduces NVILA, a family of open VLMs designed to jointly optimize efficiency and accuracy. Building on top of VILA, we improve its model architecture by first scaling up the spatial and temporal resolutions, and then compressing visual tokens. This "scale-then-compress" approach enables NVILA to efficiently process high-resolution images and long videos. We further conduct a systematic investigation that enhances NVILA's efficiency throughout its entire lifecycle, from training and fine-tuning to deployment. NVILA matches or surpasses the accuracy of leading open and proprietary VLMs across a wide range of image and video benchmarks. At the same time, it reduces training cost by 1.9-5.1x, prefilling latency by 1.6-2.2x, and decoding latency by 1.2-2.8x. We release our code and models to facilitate reproducibility.
@article{arxiv.2412.04468,
title = {NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models},
author = {Zhijian Liu and Ligeng Zhu and Baifeng Shi and Zhuoyang Zhang and Yuming Lou and Shang Yang and Haocheng Xi and Shiyi Cao and Yuxian Gu and Dacheng Li and Xiuyu Li and Yunhao Fang and Yukang Chen and Cheng-Yu Hsieh and De-An Huang and An-Chieh Cheng and Vishwesh Nath and Jinyi Hu and Sifei Liu and Ranjay Krishna and Daguang Xu and Xiaolong Wang and Pavlo Molchanov and Jan Kautz and Hongxu Yin and Song Han and Yao Lu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.04468},
year = {2026}
}