GTR: Gated Token Recurrence for Efficient Dense Prediction

Query-based Vision Transformer segmentation models typically reconstruct dense spatial feature maps to predict masks, inheriting design patterns from convolutional architectures. We show that this explicit image-space reconstruction is not required. We introduce TokenMask, a token-space mask head that computes mask logits directly from query-token affinities and performs interpolation in logit space rather than feature space. This reformulation preserves the original linear scoring mechanism while simplifying the computational structure. Across diverse ViT backbones, datasets and segmentation tasks, TokenMask consistently improves efficiency over prior approaches by reducing computational and memory requirements while maintaining competitive accuracy, leading to tangible speedups on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin using TensorRT FP16 inference. Overall, TokenMask yields a simpler and more deployment-friendly design for embedded vision systems.

Visual Geometry Transformer (VGGT) is a strong feed-forward model for multiple 3D tasks, but its Alternating-Attention (AA) stack scales quadratically in the total token count, making long clips expensive. Existing token-reduction accelerators operate inside AA, leaving the patch grid that enters AA uncompressed. We introduce PaceVGGT, a pre-AA token pruning framework that prunes DINO patch tokens before the first AA block of a frozen VGGT. PaceVGGT trains a lightweight Token Scorer that estimates per-token importance from DINO features. The scorer is first distilled against an AA-internal attention target from the unpruned backbone, then refined under downstream camera, depth, and point-map losses. A per-frame keep budget fixes the backbone-visible sequence length, while an importance-adaptive merge/prune assignment preserves residual content from high-saliency frames under a fixed total merge budget. A Feature-guided Restoration module reconstructs the dense spatial grid required by the prediction heads. On ScanNet-50 and 7-Scenes, PaceVGGT remains on the reconstruction quality--latency frontier while reducing inference latency. On ScanNet-50, it reduces latency by $5.1\times$ over unmodified VGGT at $N=300$ and $1.47\times$ over LiteVGGT at $N=1000$. These results identify pre-AA pruning as a viable acceleration route for frozen VGGT-style geometry transformers.

Despite recent progress, vision-language encoders struggle with two core limitations: (1) weak alignment between language and dense vision features, which hurts tasks like open-vocabulary semantic segmentation; and (2) high token counts for fine-grained visual representations, which limits scalability to long videos. This work addresses both limitations. We propose T-REN (Text-aligned Region Encoder Network), an efficient encoder that maps visual data to a compact set of text-aligned region-level representations (or region tokens). T-REN achieves this through a lightweight network added on top of a frozen vision backbone, trained to pool patch-level representations within each semantic region into region tokens and align them with region-level text annotations. With only 3.7% additional parameters compared to the vision-language backbone, this design yields substantially stronger dense cross-modal understanding while reducing the token count by orders of magnitude. Specifically, T-REN delivers +5.9 mIoU on ADE20K open-vocabulary segmentation, +18.4% recall on COCO object-level text-image retrieval, +15.6% recall on Ego4D video object localization, and +17.6% mIoU on VSPW video scene parsing, all while reducing token counts by more than 24x for images and 187x for videos compared to the patch-based vision-language backbone. The code and model are available at https://github.com/savya08/T-REN.