arXiv:2606. 16633v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent vision token pruning methods effectively preserve model performance under moderate token budgets but become unstable under ultra-low token budget.
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.
arXiv:2609.24485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual token pruning is a promising approach to reducing the inference cost of large vision-language models (LVLMs), yet aggressive token reduction oft...
Visual token pruning is a promising approach to reducing the inference cost of large vision-language models (LVLMs), yet aggressive token reduction often causes substantial performance degradation. We...
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.
arXiv:2609.10346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) process hundreds or thousands of visual tokens per image, incurring prohibitive inference costs. While existin...
arXiv:2604. 11530v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have revolutionized multi-modal learning by jointly processing visual and textual information.
arXiv:2608.30263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) incur substantial inference costs due to their long and highly redundant visual-token sequences. Diversity-based...
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.
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: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.
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.
SheafPrune introduces a sheaf‑guided graph propagation method for pruning visual tokens in multimodal large language models. It constructs modality‑specific maps and a sparse text‑visual graph to transfer relevance, then propagates and degree‑corrects scores on a visual graph before selecting a hard top‑k subset. Evaluated across four backbones, ten benchmarks, and seven pruning ratios, SheafPrune consistently outperforms baselines, achieving up to a 5.15× prefill speedup and 84.0% FLOPs reduction on LLaVA‑NeXT‑8B while retaining 10% of tokens.