Firebolt-VL: Efficient Vision-Language Understanding with Cross-Modality Modulation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04579v2
• Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2026 05:30:10 GMT
• Title: Firebolt-VL: Efficient Vision-Language Understanding with Cross-Modality Modulation
• Abstract summary: Firebolt-VL is an efficient vision-language model that replaces the Transformer-based decoder with a Liquid Foundation Model (LFM) decoder.<n>To further enhance visual grounding, we propose a Token-Grid Correlation Module, which computes lightweight correlations between text tokens and image patches.
• Score: 7.6937364614883625
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled impressive progress in vision-language understanding, yet their high computational cost limits deployment in resource-constrained scenarios such as personal assistants, document understanding, and smart cameras. Most existing methods rely on Transformer-based cross-attention, whose quadratic complexity hinders efficiency. Moreover, small vision-language models often struggle to precisely capture fine-grained, task-relevant visual regions, leading to degraded performance on fine-grained reasoning tasks that limit their effectiveness in the real world. To address these issues, we introduce Firebolt-VL, an efficient vision-language model that replaces the Transformer-based decoder with a Liquid Foundation Model (LFM) decoder. To further enhance visual grounding, we propose a Token-Grid Correlation Module, which computes lightweight correlations between text tokens and image patches and modulates via the state-space model with FiLM conditioning. This enables the model to selectively emphasize visual regions relevant to the textual prompt while maintaining linear-time inference. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Firebolt-VL achieves accurate, fine-grained understanding with significantly improved efficiency. Our model and code are available at: https://fireboltvl.github.io

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