[Submitted on 26 Oct 2026]
Authors:Yuqi Li, Chuanyue Yan, Neil Rodrigues, Xianglong Wang, Xiaoqin Feng, Junming Liu, Xi Xiao, Zhongwei Cheng, Wei Li, Lin Chen, Yingli Tian
Abstract:Video Large Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in video understanding and reasoning, but processing long visual sequences incurs substantial computational, latency, and memory overhead. This survey examines training-free inference acceleration, focusing on reducing inference costs while preserving task-relevant spatiotemporal evidence. We organize existing methods by their intervention stages in the inference pipeline, covering input, visual encoding, projector, prefill, and decoding. Post-training quantization (PTQ) is discussed separately as a cross-stage extension with varying calibration requirements. We analyze how intervention position affects evidence preservation and computational savings, and why local efficiency improvements may not translate into end-to-end acceleration. We complement this analysis with quantitative evidence from prior studies and our own experiments under a shared evaluation setting to assess accuracy-latency trade-offs.
Submission history
From: Neil Rodrigues [view email]
[v1] Mon, 26 Oct 2026 21:55:44 UTC (263 KB)
