MARC: Memory-Augmented RL Token Compression for Efficient Video Understanding
This addresses efficiency challenges in video understanding for applications like video QA, surveillance, and autonomous driving, representing a strong specific gain rather than a foundational breakthrough.
The paper tackles the high computational cost of visual language models for videos by proposing MARC, a memory-augmented reinforcement learning token compression method, which reduces visual tokens by 95%, GPU memory by 72%, and latency by 23.9% while maintaining near-baseline accuracy on six benchmarks.
The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has laid the foundation for multimodal models. However, visual language models (VLMs) still face heavy computational costs when extended from images to videos due to high frame rates and long durations. Token compression is a promising solution, yet most existing training-free methods cause information loss and performance degradation. To overcome this, we propose \textbf{Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning-based Token Compression (MARC)}, which integrates structured retrieval and RL-based distillation. MARC adopts a \textit{retrieve-then-compress} strategy using a \textbf{Visual Memory Retriever (VMR)} to select key clips and a \textbf{Compression Group Relative Policy Optimization (C-GRPO)} framework to distil reasoning ability from a teacher to a student model. Experiments on six video benchmarks show that MARC achieves near-baseline accuracy using only one frame's tokens -- reducing visual tokens by \textbf{95\%}, GPU memory by \textbf{72\%}, and latency by \textbf{23.9\%}. This demonstrates its potential for efficient, real-time video understanding in resource-constrained settings such as video QA, surveillance, and autonomous driving.