arXiv AI

Do All Visual Tokens Matter Equally? Object-Evidence Preserving Token Merging for Vision-Language Retrieval

arXiv:2607. 04605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-vector vision-language retrieval preserves fine-grained visual evidence through maximum-similarity late interaction, but dense image-side tokens make storage and scoring expensive.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

Do All Visual Tokens Matter Equally? Object-Evidence Preserving Token Merging for Vision-Language Retrieval

Multi-vector vision-language retrieval preserves fine-grained visual evidence through maximum-similarity late interaction, but dense image-side tokens make storage and scoring expensive. Existing token compression methods reduce this cost, yet they can remove or collapse object- and region-level evidence that future query tokens may need to select.

arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

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

arXiv:2609.34330v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in multimodal understanding, but processing large numbers of visu...

By Tinghao Wang, Yichen Guo, Qizhe Zhang, Yuan Zhang, Weimin Ouyang, Rui Huang, Jiajun Cao, Sixiang Chen, Hao Jiang, Jixian Wu, Zheng Lu, Bofan Zhu, Renyuan Li, 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 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
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Not All Attention Heads Contribute to Critical Visual Token Selection: Head-Aware Pruning Matters More

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.

By Chaofang Ma, Lin Jiang, Carol Jingyi Li, Xingyu Liu, Zeyu Li, Jiang Xu, Wei Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Position Is All You Need: A Free Lunch Token Compression Strategy for MLLM-based Referring Expression Segmentation

The paper introduces PAYN, a training‑free token compression strategy for Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) based Referring Expression Segmentation (RES). By preserving original position embeddings and local spatial structures, PAYN retains tokens that are evenly distributed across neighboring regions, thereby maintaining spatial relational consistency. Experiments on multiple RES benchmarks show that PAYN outperforms existing token compression methods, confirming that position information alone is sufficient for effective compression in this task.

By Yuhan Liu, Yixiong Zou, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 27

MAViE: A Multi-scale Adaptive Vision Encoder for Fine-grained Visual Perception and Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

Vision-language models commonly project all tokens produced by a pretrained vision encoder into a large language model. However, final-layer features can discard text, local attributes, and spatial relationships, while high-resolution inputs substantially increase context length and inference latency.