arXiv:2606. 27161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, but their efficiency is limited by the large number of visual tokens, which introduces substantial computational overhead.
By Tinghao Wang, Yichen Guo, Rui Huang, Zheng Lu, Qizhe Zhang, Chenxi Li, Yuan Zhang, Jiajun Cao, Zhirong Shen, Yaosong Du, Guangyan Gan, Wenya Wang, Lin William Cong, Shanghang Zhang
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...
By Yichen Guo, Tinghao Wang, Qizhe Zhang, Lingbei Meng, Yuan Zhang, Jiajun Cao, Hao Jiang, Chenwei Wu, Jixian Wu, Sixiang Chen, Tao Luo, Hongyang Cheng, Kai Tang, Chenxi Li, Renyuan Li, Xiande Huang, Wenya Wang, Shanghang Zhang
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.
By Shiyu Li, Zi-Yuan Hu, Shijia Huang, Yanyang Li, Yiwu Zhong, Liwei Wang
arXiv:2607. 07033v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models incur substantial inference costs because high-resolution inputs introduce thousands of visual tokens, many of which are redundant for a given query.
By Kyuan Oh, Bumsoo Kim
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...
By Weixuan Li, Zikun Zhou, Xinyi Zhuang, Xinyan Guo, Rui Tian, Chuyao Zhang, Lin Gao
arXiv:2608. 07193v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual-token pruning can substantially reduce the inference cost of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), yet existing methods largely rely on fixed, handcrafted heuristics and costly expert trial and error.
By Zhen Liu, Wenli Huang, Wei Song, Yuhan Liu, Zhiqin Yang, Jingwen Fu
arXiv:2608. 19285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have enhanced the capabilities of pre-trained LLMs by adding vision tokens alongside text, with approaches like LLaVA showing impressive results.
By Baptiste Rossigneux, Inna Kucher, Vincent Lorrain, Emmanuel Casseau
CoverPruner is a training‑free visual token pruner that reframes token pruning as a representational coverage maximization problem. Instead of selecting which tokens to keep, it asks which surviving token best represents each removed token for a vision‑language model. Experiments on various VLM architectures show that CoverPruner consistently outperforms existing methods, especially under high compression rates.
By Qingchan Zhu, Weihang You, Hanqi Jiang, Changdi Yang, Tianming Liu, Geng Yuan
The paper argues that token importance alone is insufficient to determine safe removal of visual tokens in multimodal large language models, because removability depends on representation depth and the surrounding deletion set. Through controlled experiments, the authors show that the same tokens can have different effects when removed at different depths or contexts. They introduce CoRePrune, a training‑free two‑stage pruning framework that refreshes deletion effects as visual representations evolve and refines candidate tokens based on the current deletion set, achieving high performance retention across multiple backbones and reducing prefill time significantly.
By Shengli He, Yongchao Liang, Roumeng He, Junjie Zeng, Jiyuan He, Xin Fang, Can Wu, Li Zheng
arXiv:2609.01224v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Visual token pruning reduces the inference overhead of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by retaining only a subset of visual tokens. Existing m...
By Yuanyuan Jia, Shunpu Tang, Qianqian Yang
arXiv:2607. 23913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly rely on dynamic or high-resolution visual encoding, producing thousands of visual tokens that substantially increase downstream language-model inference cost.
By Jun Ling, Tao Huang, Junzhuo Liu, Bowen Tang, Peng Wang
arXiv:2608. 07088v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) encode images as long visual token sequences, making prefilling and KV-cache storage expensive.
By Qiyanhui Lu, Han Wu, Rongjian Xu, Tingzhang Luo, Cheng Fan, Xinghao Chen, Minjing Dong, Jufeng Yang, Jianyuan Guo