@inproceedings{jiang-etal-2026-v,
title = "{V}-{C}o{LA}: Vision Token Compression with Linear Attention",
author = "Jiang, Hao and
Mao, Yiru and
Bu, Tianpeng and
Zhou, Hao and
Duan, Hongtao and
Jing, Wang and
Xu, Bowen and
Chen, Xin and
hu, Lulu and
Yang, Bin and
Tao, Yongliang and
Zhang, Minying",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2593/",
pages = "58891--58906",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities but suffer from substantial computational overhead, as vision tokens dominate the input sequence. This motivates vision token compression as a key direction to alleviate the burden. However, with the emergence of hybrid architectures incorporating linear attention (, Qwen3.5), prior methods designed for softmax attention struggle to generalize. Our analysis reveals that both attention- and similarity-based approaches suffer notable performance degradation, underscoring the urgent need for compression methods tailored to this regime. To this end, we propose \textbf{V-CoLA}, an efficient training-free token compression framework specifically designed for linear attention. V-CoLA introduces a novel \textit{uniqueness-aware importance criterion} for identifying critical vision tokens, coupled with an \textit{adaptive token merging strategy} that performs compression. All components are optimized at the implementation level to remain compatible with the chunk-wise parallelism of linear attention, ensuring strong practical value. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of V-CoLA: it achieves 99.5{\%} of the original performance with only 50.0{\%} of vision tokens, and over 88.0{\%} with as few as 12.5{\%}, while delivering a 1.86$\times$ to 6.15$\times$ prefill speedup."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="jiang-etal-2026-v">
<titleInfo>
<title>V-CoLA: Vision Token Compression with Linear Attention</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hao</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Jiang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yiru</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Mao</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tianpeng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hao</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhou</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hongtao</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Duan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Wang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Jing</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Bowen</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Xin</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Lulu</namePart>
<namePart type="family">hu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Bin</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Yang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yongliang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Tao</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Minying</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hung-Yi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lee</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sunipa</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Dev</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jessy</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Desmond</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Elliott</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-459-0</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities but suffer from substantial computational overhead, as vision tokens dominate the input sequence. This motivates vision token compression as a key direction to alleviate the burden. However, with the emergence of hybrid architectures incorporating linear attention (, Qwen3.5), prior methods designed for softmax attention struggle to generalize. Our analysis reveals that both attention- and similarity-based approaches suffer notable performance degradation, underscoring the urgent need for compression methods tailored to this regime. To this end, we propose V-CoLA, an efficient training-free token compression framework specifically designed for linear attention. V-CoLA introduces a novel uniqueness-aware importance criterion for identifying critical vision tokens, coupled with an adaptive token merging strategy that performs compression. All components are optimized at the implementation level to remain compatible with the chunk-wise parallelism of linear attention, ensuring strong practical value. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of V-CoLA: it achieves 99.5% of the original performance with only 50.0% of vision tokens, and over 88.0% with as few as 12.5%, while delivering a 1.86\times to 6.15\times prefill speedup.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">jiang-etal-2026-v</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2593/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-10</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>58891</start>
<end>58906</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T V-CoLA: Vision Token Compression with Linear Attention
%A Jiang, Hao
%A Mao, Yiru
%A Bu, Tianpeng
%A Zhou, Hao
%A Duan, Hongtao
%A Jing, Wang
%A Xu, Bowen
%A Chen, Xin
%A hu, Lulu
%A Yang, Bin
%A Tao, Yongliang
%A Zhang, Minying
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F jiang-etal-2026-v
%X Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities but suffer from substantial computational overhead, as vision tokens dominate the input sequence. This motivates vision token compression as a key direction to alleviate the burden. However, with the emergence of hybrid architectures incorporating linear attention (, Qwen3.5), prior methods designed for softmax attention struggle to generalize. Our analysis reveals that both attention- and similarity-based approaches suffer notable performance degradation, underscoring the urgent need for compression methods tailored to this regime. To this end, we propose V-CoLA, an efficient training-free token compression framework specifically designed for linear attention. V-CoLA introduces a novel uniqueness-aware importance criterion for identifying critical vision tokens, coupled with an adaptive token merging strategy that performs compression. All components are optimized at the implementation level to remain compatible with the chunk-wise parallelism of linear attention, ensuring strong practical value. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of V-CoLA: it achieves 99.5% of the original performance with only 50.0% of vision tokens, and over 88.0% with as few as 12.5%, while delivering a 1.86\times to 6.15\times prefill speedup.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2593/
%P 58891-58906
Markdown (Informal)
[V-CoLA: Vision Token Compression with Linear Attention](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2593/) (Jiang et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Hao Jiang, Yiru Mao, Tianpeng Bu, Hao Zhou, Hongtao Duan, Wang Jing, Bowen Xu, Xin Chen, Lulu hu, Bin Yang, Yongliang Tao, and Minying Zhang. 2026. V-CoLA: Vision Token Compression with Linear Attention. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 58891–58906, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.