POINTS-Long: Dynamic Dual-Mode Visual Understanding in MLLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in cross-modal understanding and generation. However, the rapid growth of visual token sequences—especially in long-video and streaming scenarios—poses a major challenge to their scalability and real-world deployment. Thus, we introduce POINTS-Long, a native dual-mode MLLM featuring dynamic visual token scaling inspired by the human visual system. The model supports two complementary perception modes: focus mode and standby mode, enabling users to dynamically trade off efficiency and accuracy during inference. On fine-grained visual tasks, the focus mode retains the optimal performance, while on long-form general visual understanding, the standby mode retains 97.7-99.7\% of the original accuracy using only 1/40-1/10th of the visual tokens. Moreover, POINTS-Long natively supports streaming visual understanding via a dynamically detachable KV-cache design, allowing efficient maintenance of ultra-long visual memory. Our work provides new insights into the design of future MLLMs and lays the foundation for adaptive visual reasoning and efficient long-form visual understanding. Model weights will be released upon publication.