Vikas Chandra

Grateful to @sallywf and @EETimes for the thoughtful writeup of my Embedded Vision Summit keynote. The thesis in one line: the next decade of AI won't be won by the biggest model, but by the smartest, most efficient one that lives on the devices you wear! eetimes.com/scaling-down-i…

Audio is the most ignored perception modality in on-device AI. Every smart glass, robot, and drone has a mic. Almost none fuse audio + vision at perception time. Vision-only is the vibe-coded version of multimodal perception.

the market loves to talk hardware because stock prices go brrr but the most interesting thing happening right now is in alternative model architectures

3/ Even Qwen2.5 Omni hits just 27.3% on foreground and 39.5% on background sound accuracy. Audio hallucination is widespread in today's AV-LLMs, and robust evaluation has to be a first-class metric for AR/wearable use cases. 📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2604.23860

2/ Setup: 300 egocentric videos, 1,000 sound-focused Q/As, with a taxonomy that separates foreground action sounds (from the user's activity) and background ambient sounds.

1/ New @ieeeICASSP 2026 (Oral): "Exploring Audio Hallucination in Egocentric Video Understanding." Audio-visual LLMs often "hear" things they didn't, inferring sounds from visual cues alone. We built a benchmark to quantify it.

@MingchenZhuge @AilingZeng81332 @tikgiau @shirleyrz_ @sherryyangML @sthuyan @_yunzhong @SchmidhuberAI @Wenyi_AI_Wang @dmitrii_tech @PiotrPiekosAI Thanks @MingchenZhuge for all your hard work in both organizing and running this awesome workshop!

Thanks to all the organizers: @AilingZeng81332 @tikgiau @shirleyrz_ @sherryyangML @sthuyan @_yunzhong @vikasc @SchmidhuberAI and friends coming for help today @Wenyi_AI_Wang @dmitrii_tech @PiotrPiekosAI We truly appreciate all the authors who submitted their papers to our workshop. Special thanks to the 352 reviewers who completed their reviews. And thanks to @TencentHunyuan @Meta @BAAIBeijing @KAUST_News for their sponsorship.

Long post pulling the field together, leaning on my group's work (EUPE, EfficientSAM, Efficient Track Anything, EdgeTAM, LongVU, EgoAVU, VideoAuto-R1, DepthLM, ParetoQ) placed against the parallel work in each section. v-chandra.github.io/efficient-vide…

What's still hard is mostly deployment: streaming at hour-plus durations, sub-watt AR glasses, open-set anomaly detection, cross-camera reasoning, spatial grounding through cuts, closed-loop eval. The bottleneck moved from models to the stack around them.

Efficient Video Intelligence in 2026 🧵 Five years ago video understanding meant action recognition on Kinetics-400. Now VLMs reason over hour-long footage, foundation-grade tracking runs at 16 FPS on a phone, and one sub-100M backbone replaces four specialized encoders.

Diffusion models couldn't reason because RL was too expensive, not because the architecture was wrong. dTRPO collapses trajectory computation to one forward pass. On a 7B model: +9.6% GPQA, +4.3% HumanEval+. The architecture question is open again. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.18806

Standard approach to long video: more frames, bigger context. Tempo flips it. A small VLM reads the question first, then compresses the video around it. 6B params. 8K visual tokens. Outperforms GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro on hour-long videos. arxiv.org/pdf/2604.08120

Been thinking about what this paper really means. "Video diffusion" and "World Models" are becoming synonymous. Neural Computers are basically video diffusion world models for terminal envs and GUI. Lots of talk last week about automating Manim videos. In theory, we should be able to train these world models on a 10000 hours of diverse manim videos and "see where it goes" If a NC can generate outputs to terminal commands, it should be able to generate videos like this directly from prompt too. Without writing code.

Classical computers run programs. Agents wrap models around programs. Neural Computers ask: what if the model is the program, the memory, and the machine? New paper exploring fully learned runtimes where computation emerges from weights alone. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.06425

the market is reacting to the memory shortage by buying Sandisk assuming that labs continue to run less optimized versions of their own models and overspend on hardware but the longer term signal to take from the memory wall is to focus on the continued scaling down of models deployed compute has scaled 3x every 2 years while memory bandwidth has only scaled 1.6x over 20 years - every new GPU generation widens this gap - but we've also been grossly overusing memory via the common training mode. APOLLO showed that AdamW, the standard LLM optimizer, stores redundant state for every single parameter, and that coarser gradient approximations achieve the same training quality with a fraction of the memory, enabling model pre-training on a 1/8 the GPU capacity. many more proof points are coming to light re: optimizing algorithms and efficiency of smaller models. in fact small models can outperform much larger models by spending more compute at inference time good read on this from @vikasc

Neural Computers arxiv.org/abs/2604.06425

🫱 Introducing 𝐍𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐫s: 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐟 𝐀𝐈 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐭𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟? Beyond today's conventional computers, agents, and world models, Neural Computers (NCs) are new frontiers where computation, memory, and I/O move into a learned runtime state. We ask: whether parts of runtime can move inward into the learning system itself. This is our first step toward the Completely Neural Computer (CNC): a general-purpose neural computer with stable execution, explicit reprogramming, and durable capability reuse. Work done with Mingchen Zhuge (@MingchenZhuge), Changsheng Zhao, Haozhe Liu (@HaoZhe65347 ), Zijian Zhou (@ZijianZhou524 ), Shuming Liu (@shuming96 ), Wenyi Wang (@Wenyi_AI_Wang ), Ernie Chang (@erniecyc ), Gael Le Lan, Junjie Fei, Wenxuan Zhang, Zhipeng Cai (@cai_zhipeng ), Zechun Liu (@zechunliu ), Yunyang Xiong (@YoungXiong1 ), Yining Yang, Yuandong Tian (@tydsh ), Yangyang Shi, Vikas Chandra (@vikasc), Juergen Schmidhuber (@SchmidhuberAI)

On-Device LLMs: State of the Union, 2026 Three years ago, running an LLM on a phone was a toy demo. Today, billion-parameter models run in real time. What changed? Not just faster chips - we had to rethink everything. Full post: v-chandra.github.io/on-device-llms/

The AI industry is betting on hardware to solve the memory wall. But what if the bottleneck isn't hardware, but how we use it? New post on attacking memory constraints algorithmically—and why the "bigger is better" era is ending. v-chandra.github.io/ai-memory-wall/