
GTR: Gated Token Recurrence for Efficient Dense Prediction
Abstract: GTR introduces a softmax-free recurrent vision backbone for efficient dense prediction at high image resolutions. It combines gated linear attention, alternating spatial scan directions, and spatially enhanced SwiGLU blocks, then distills final-layer patch tokens from a detection-specialized DINOv3 teacher using a single alignment loss. With Objects365 detector pre-training, GTR-L reaches 58.9 box AP on COCO val2017 at 1.908 ms median batch-one forward latency on an RTX 4090 with compiled FP16 execution. The same backbone design supports instance segmentation, human pose estimation, oriented detection, semantic segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. A specialized chunkwise CUDA operator is 4.0 times faster than FLA v0.5.0 at 1,600 tokens in the reported isolated benchmark, while TensorRT deployment on DRIVE AGX Thor records 2.282 to 8.769 ms median batch-one latency across the evaluated task and scale combinations.

















