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Salient Knowledge Pathways: Sparse Cross-Modal Routing for Efficient Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Question Answering

Research Multimodal & Generative

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Popularity 45

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Merged summary

TL;DR - SKIP is a sparse inference architecture for knowledge-intensive multimodal question answering that dynamically limits visual processing, retrieval, and cross-modal fusion. It matches or surpasses dense baselines while using 3.4–6.8× fewer FLOPs and 2.7× less latency.

  • Combines question-guided visual token pruning, region-conditional retrieval, and sparse cross-attention.
  • Adapts compute budgets to predicted question difficulty and speculatively verifies retrieved knowledge.
  • Derives an information-bottleneck bound suggesting optimal visual sparsity scales as (O(1/\sqrt{N})).
  • Evaluated across five benchmarks, including OK-VQA, InfoSeek, and Encyclopedic-VQA.

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Salient Knowledge Pathways: Sparse Cross-Modal Routing for Efficient Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Question Answering

arXiv cs.AI Noor Islam S. Mohammad, Uluğ Bayazıt 2026-07-28 arXiv:2607.25422
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-28 14:34:22.269773 UTC

TL;DR - SKIP is a sparse inference architecture for knowledge-intensive multimodal question answering that dynamically limits visual processing, retrieval, and cross-modal fusion. It matches or surpasses dense baselines while using 3.4–6.8× fewer FLOPs and 2.7× less latency.

  • Combines question-guided visual token pruning, region-conditional retrieval, and sparse cross-attention.
  • Adapts compute budgets to predicted question difficulty and speculatively verifies retrieved knowledge.
  • Derives an information-bottleneck bound suggesting optimal visual sparsity scales as (O(1/\sqrt{N})).
  • Evaluated across five benchmarks, including OK-VQA, InfoSeek, and Encyclopedic-VQA.
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