Abundant visual information strengthens vision-language model (VLM) perception, yet massive visual tokens raise inference costs. Existing visual token pruning methods rely on similarity-based guidance, which exploits pairwise text-vision and vision-vision token correlations for compression.
arXiv:2609.36916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) incur high inference latency from long visual token sequences. Existing pruning methods commonly use attention...
arXiv:2609.05916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve strong multimodal understanding, but the hundreds to thousands of visual tokens they process impose subs...
arXiv:2609.37581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding and reasoning but often incur substantial inference costs due to the large number of visu...
SinkPruner is a training‑free framework that prunes visual tokens for multimodal large language models by first removing high‑norm redundant tokens with a visual sanitizer and then selectively keeping tokens that align with the text query using a text‑guided pruner. The coarse‑to‑fine design reduces attention sink and dispersion, enabling an 89% token reduction while preserving 96.5% of LLaVA‑1.5’s performance and 91.8% of Qwen2.5‑VL’s performance across twelve image‑language and four video‑language benchmarks. The visual sanitizer also improves existing pruning methods, showing strong transferability.
VIVAS is a new Vision‑Language Model pre‑training framework that addresses the lack of fine‑grained visual perception in existing VLMs. It introduces a unified token space and a dense‑structural‑semantic vision tokenizer that expands the textual vocabulary with visual tokens, enabling vision‑language unified autoregressive supervision over both visual details and linguistic content. Trained on 12.4 T tokens, VIVAS achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on 7 tasks and 39 multimodal benchmarks.
arXiv:2608.06411v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse vision-language tasks, but their efficiency is limited by...
arXiv:2606. 09131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) commonly inherit the deep, symmetric Transformer backbone designed for unimodal text modeling, and apply the same computation uniformly to image and language tokens.
arXiv:2508.03351v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse language tasks, motivating their extension to vision-la...
The paper introduces a training‑free visual token pruning strategy for vision‑language models that separates early vision‑guided pruning from later text‑guided reselection. By first pruning tokens with vision‑encoder attention, retaining candidates until the decoder midpoint, and then applying text‑to‑visual attention, the method preserves task‑relevant visual information. Across eight benchmarks and three models, it achieves an average performance recovery of 11.10 and 16.84 percentage points at 80% and 90% pruning, respectively, while maintaining comparable or lower LLM‑prefill latency.
arXiv:2608. 06411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse vision-language tasks, but their efficiency is limited by the cost of processing numerous visual tokens.
The paper shows that only a small subset of attention heads in vision-language models is responsible for selecting critical visual tokens. By pruning tokens based on similarity before LLM reasoning and then applying head‑aware pruning during reasoning, the proposed ProViP framework achieves high task performance with significant speedups. Experiments on LLaVA‑1.5‑7B demonstrate 95.9% performance retention and a 1.62× inference speedup at an 88.9% pruning ratio.
arXiv:2605. 13178v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In large vision-language models, visual tokens typically constitute the majority of input tokens, leading to substantial computational overhead.