ViPE: Visual Perception in Parameter Space for Efficient Video-Language Understanding

Existing video-language models (Video-LLMs) typically rely on concatenating visual tokens with textual inputs for joint modeling. However, this token-level alignment leads to significant inefficiency, especially when scaling to long videos with dense visual inputs. In this work, we propose a video-to-parameter efficiency paradigm named ViPE that eliminates redundant visual tokens by transforming video content into visual perceptual weights, which are directly injected into the LLM's parameters. ViPE consists of a visual injection module that compresses video features into a small set of perceptual queries using a hierarchical merge strategy, and a visual perception module that integrates the resulting representations into the LLM through a lightweight LoRA-like mechanism. ViPE achieves performance comparable to token-based baselines such as LLaVA, while reducing FLOPs by 85% and inference time by up to 65%, demonstrating a highly efficient and scalable solution for video understanding.