BARD: Bridging AutoRegressive and Diffusion Vision-Language Models Via Highly Efficient Progressive Block Merging and Stage-Wise Distillation

Baoyou Chen, Hanchen Xia, Peng Tu +5

Autoregressive vision-language models (VLMs) deliver strong multimodal capability, but their token-by-token decoding imposes a fundamental inference bottleneck. Diffusion VLMs offe…