arXiv AI

Scaling Vision Transformers Without Training: Prune-and-Merge Token Compression

The paper introduces Prune-and-Merge ViT, a training‑free token compression framework for Vision Transformers that combines class‑attention pruning with similarity‑based merging to reduce computational cost while preserving semantic information. It evaluates robustness using two new metrics—Relative Accuracy Drop (RAD) and Prediction Flip Rate (PFR)—and shows that the method maintains or improves accuracy on pretrained ViT and DeiT models compared to existing token reduction techniques. The authors also argue that the hybrid approach does not induce hallucination‑like behavior and keeps predictions stable under common image transformations.

arXiv Computer Vision
2d ago

SCMerge: Spatial-Consistency-Aware Token Pair Merging for Efficient Semantic Segmentation

arXiv:2610.21642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision Transformer architectures have showcased impressive performance on semantic segmentation, yet their quadratic attention complexity hinders pract...

By Junfeng Ren (Southern University of Science and Technology), Yi Gong (Southern University of Science and Technology), Yuan Zeng (Shenzhen Technology University)
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

ERASE: Eliminating Redundant Visual Tokens via Adaptive Two-Stage Token Pruning

ERASE is an adaptive two-stage token pruning framework designed to reduce computational overhead in Vision‑Language Models by eliminating redundant visual tokens. Stage 1 removes image‑level redundancy using lightweight raw‑image statistics, while Stage 2 progressively prunes instruction‑irrelevant tokens across decoder layers. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B show that ERASE retains 95.70 % of the original accuracy while keeping only 25 % of the tokens.

By Yuna Lee, Kyoungho Min, Yulhwa Kim
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Multi-Image Visual Token Pruning in Large Visual Language Models

The paper introduces Adaptive Visual Token Pruning (AVTP), a training‑free framework that dynamically selects pruning layers and ratios for large vision‑language models (LVLMs) when processing multiple image sequences. By analyzing visual attention distributions across different LVLM architectures, AVTP adapts token retention to image importance, enabling efficient inference without relying on attention‑based computations incompatible with FlashAttention. Experiments show significant speedups—up to 2× for Qwen3VL‑8B—while preserving or even improving accuracy on multi‑image benchmarks.

By Rongyang Zhang, Chengqiang Lu, Cong Li, Hongchao Gu, Tingjia Shen, Xuyang Zhi, Qimeng Wang, Yan Gao, Yi Wu, Yao Hu, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

LearnPruner: Rethinking Attention-based Token Pruning in Vision Language Models

LearnPruner rethinks token pruning in vision‑language models by addressing shortcomings of attention mechanisms in vision encoders and large language models. The method uses a two‑stage approach: first a learnable pruning module removes redundant vision tokens after the vision encoder, then only task‑relevant tokens are kept in the LLM’s middle layer. Experiments show that LearnPruner retains about 95% of performance while using only 5.5% of vision tokens, achieving a 3.2× speed‑up.

By Rinyoichi Takezoe, Yaqian Li, Zihao Bo, Anzhou Hou, Mo Guang, Kaiwen Long