arXiv Computer Vision

Cut-ViT: Task-Specific Model Pruning via Gram Anchoring Subspace Consistency

Cut‑ViT introduces a task‑specific pruning pipeline for visual foundation models that uses gram anchoring matrices and subspace decomposition to align feature representations between native and pruned DINOv3 models. The method incorporates basis‑agnostic and residual constraints to preserve robustness across spatial and channel dimensions, and employs spectral entropy adaptation to tailor the pruning objective to downstream tasks. Experiments demonstrate that Cut‑ViT achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on six tasks across nine datasets while reducing pruning time to about one minute on a single A100 GPU, using only 20.9% of the time and 45.5% of the GPU memory compared to prior methods.

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
Aug 10

Prune Once: Retraining-Free Task-Agnostic Pruning for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2608. 06901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable generalization across diverse multimodal tasks through large-scale pre-training, yet their rapidly increasing computational and memory requirements pose significant challenges for deployment in constrained environments.

By Minseok Kang, Hyunwoo Kim, Chanyoung Kim, Minwoo Kim, Jaekoo Lee, Dahuin Jung
arXiv AI
Oct 28

LearnPrunerV2: Learnable Progressive Token Pruning for Vision-Language Models

LearnPrunerV2 is a fully learnable token‑pruning framework for Vision‑Language Models that replaces heuristic pruning with lightweight modules in every backbone layer. These modules estimate token importance by combining visual saliency and query relevance via a shadow token, revealing a consistent staircase redundancy pattern across layers. The method introduces Budget‑Deterministic Pruning to set fixed per‑layer budgets, achieving state‑of‑the‑art efficiency while preserving 99.8% of performance even after pruning 77.8% of visual tokens on LLaVA‑v1.5.

By Rinyoichi Takezoe, Yaqian Li, Weiren Wang, Zihao Bo, Huihong Shi, Anzhou Hou, Mo Guang, Jiale Yan, Kaiwen Long
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Shallow to Deep: Aligning Token Pruning with Stage-wise Roles in LVLMs

The paper introduces STD, a hierarchical token pruning framework for Large Vision‑Language Models that aligns pruning strategies with the functional roles of different network stages. By using high‑frequency spectral analysis in shallow layers, Gaussian‑smoothed attention in intermediate layers, and a stability‑adaptive trigger in deep layers, STD preserves essential visual information while aggressively reducing token counts. Experiments demonstrate that STD outperforms existing pruning methods, achieving up to 94.4% token reduction and a 3.9× speed‑up on LLaVA‑NeXT‑7B.

By Shuo Zhang, Jintao Tong, Yixiong Zou, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Adaptive Two-Stage Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Inference in Video-Language Models

arXiv:2608. 03112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models excel at image and video understanding but suffer from high inference latency due to the need to process thousands of tokens per image, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices and in real-time surveillance applications.

By Paribesh Regmi, Qingshuang Chen, Chi Zhang, Heba Aly, Yelin Kim, Hongda Mao