Llama-Mobile: Efficient 2.7-Bit Quantization of VLMs

Deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) under aggressive low-bit inference remains challenging because inference cost is dominated by the long visual-token prefix during prefill and the growing KV cache during autoregressive decoding. Token pruning and low-bit quantization are complementary for reducing these costs, yet naive stage-wise combinations are often brittle due to a mismatch between quantization calibration and pruning execution. We present a collaborative quantization-and-pruning framework that unifies low-bit inference and deterministic visual-token pruning in a single deployable pipeline. The framework introduces the Quantization Unified Offline Token Allocator (QUOTA), which converts low-bit calibration signals into a layer-wise token allocation schedule and materializes it as a pruning recipe. Token importance is evaluated under deployed W4A4 operators with a quantized KV cache by combining activation magnitude, attention cues, and an explicit low-bit risk signal, enabling consistent budgeted top-$k$ selection. Experiments on standard VLM benchmarks show improved robustness over stage-wise baselines under the same low-bit regime, achieving 95.65% average retention while retaining only 30% of visual tokens, compared with about 94.3% retention for representative stage-wise combinations. The code will be released.

Deploying vision-language models (VLMs) in resource-constrained settings demands low latency and high throughput, yet existing compact VLMs often fall short of the inference speedups their smaller parameter counts suggest. To explain this discrepancy, we conduct an empirical end-to-end efficiency analysis and systematically profile inference to identify the dominant bottlenecks. Based on these findings, we develop optimization recipes tailored to compact VLMs that substantially reduce latency while preserving accuracy. These techniques cut time to first token (TTFT) by 53% on InternVL3-2B and by 93% on SmolVLM-256M. Our recipes are broadly applicable across both VLM architectures and common serving frameworks, providing practical guidance for building efficient VLM systems. Beyond efficiency, we study how to extend compact VLMs with structured perception outputs and introduce the resulting model family, ArgusVLM. Across diverse benchmarks, ArgusVLM achieves strong performance while maintaining a compact and efficient design.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse language tasks, motivating their extension to vision-language models (VLMs) for multimodal understanding. However, billion-parameter VLMs incur substantial memory and computational costs that hinder deployment in resource-constrained settings. Post-training quantization (PTQ) compresses models and accelerates inference without retraining, yet remains underexplored for VLMs. We identify two intrinsic VLM activation properties in PTQ: (1) visual over-representation, where vision tokens are excessive and often redundant, and (2) the modality gap separating text and vision tokens in the latent feature space. Prior methods largely overlook these properties, leading to quantization performance degradation. To address this mismatch, we propose SalQ-VLM, an importance-aware PTQ framework that prioritizes salient tokens and suppresses redundant vision tokens during calibration. We derive a gradient-driven importance factor that captures token-level importance variance and is theoretically grounded in the relationship among loss perturbation, activation errors, and output gradients. SalQ-VLM obtains this factor through a single lightweight block-wise gradient-caching pass and incorporates it into the layer-wise reconstruction objective. Because SalQ-VLM modifies only calibration, it adds no inference-time operations and remains compatible with existing high-performance kernels. Extensive evaluations across benchmarks and backbones show that SalQ-VLM consistently outperforms strong PTQ baselines, especially under ultra-low-bit quantization. Notably, it improves MME-RealWorld accuracy by 16.45% under INT2g128 quantization.