arXiv Computer Vision

MiCo: Mutual Information Coverage Optimization through Semantic Erasure Modeling for Efficient MLLM Inference

arXiv AI
Jun 26

TOPS: First-Principles Visual Token Pruning via Constructing Token Optimal Preservation Sets for Efficient MLLM Inference

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 AI
Sep 10

STAR-Pro: Stage-Wise Token Adaptive Reduction with Progressive Refinement for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models

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
arXiv AI
Sep 2

SinkPruner: Sink-Free Visual Token Pruning for Multimodal Large Language Models

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 Machine Learning
Sep 4

Who Speaks for the Pruned? Visual Token Pruning as Coverage Optimization

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

From Token Importance to Conditional Removability: Rethinking Visual Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models

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