FVNet: Harnessing Liquid Neural Dynamics for Lightweight Visual Representation

Abstract Efficient visual backbone design remains crucial for resource-constrained computer vision applications. Inspired by the adaptive continuous-time dynamics observed in biological neurons, we propose FVNet, a novel lightweight architecture that integrates liquid neural dynamics for efficient and dynamic visual feature extraction. Central to FVNet is the Fluid Temporal Flow Unit (FTFU), which employs continuous-time equations with learnable time constants to capture spatio-temporal dependencies adaptively. By further stacking these units in a Multi-Phase Fluid Block (MPFB), our model processes features across parallel temporal scales, enabling context-aware feature encoding without incurring excessive computational overhead. Through a discrete closed-form solution, FVNet achieves the representational power of continuous-time models while avoiding the instability and overhead of iterative numerical solvers. Extensive experiments on various vision tasks demonstrate that FVNet achieves superior performance and efficiency over existing state-of-the-art lightweight networks.