VisCache introduces a two-stage, plug‑and‑play framework for pruning visual key‑value caches in Vision Large Language Models without retraining. The first stage filters out temporally redundant keyframes, while the second stage, PruneKV, applies a parabolic layer‑wise budget and asymmetric update to selectively prune keys and fuse values, preserving essential context. Experiments show up to 2.35× speedup and significant memory savings with only 19–28% of the original cache retained, outperforming existing baselines.
By Lyuke Wang, Zhuo Li, Guangxu Zhu
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
Compact vision-language models (VLMs) now power a growing share of multimodal applications. The benchmarks used to compare them, however, inherit a frontier-centric design: each model is reduced to a...
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...
By Haiji Liang, Pengfei Zhou, Zhenglin Wan, Wei Wang, Yang You, Wangbo Zhao
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:2603. 00198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Token reduction accelerates long-video vision--language models (VLMs), but existing methods target Transformers, where reduction is treated as token pruning.
By Jindong Jiang, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Karan Sapra, Zhiding Yu, Guilin Liu, Andrew Tao, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Wonmin Byeon
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
PRISM‑VLM is a new benchmark for compact vision‑language models that evaluates each item across seven axes—task quality, behavioral robustness, and capability bottlenecks—rather than collapsing performance into a single accuracy score. It aggregates these axes into a single PScore while also providing per‑axis profiles, revealing differences that single‑axis benchmarks miss, such as sycophancy. The benchmark draws on items from fifteen public datasets and will be released with its full pipeline, prompts, and annotations.
By Sanghee Park, Kee-Eung Kim
The paper introduces Adaptive Visual Token Pruning (AVTP), a training‑free framework that dynamically selects pruning layers and ratios for large vision‑language models (LVLMs) when processing multiple image sequences. By analyzing visual attention distributions across different LVLM architectures, AVTP adapts token retention to image importance, enabling efficient inference without relying on attention‑based computations incompatible with FlashAttention. Experiments show significant speedups—up to 2× for Qwen3VL‑8B—while preserving or even improving accuracy on multi‑image benchmarks.
By Rongyang Zhang, Chengqiang Lu, Cong Li, Hongchao Gu, Tingjia Shen, Xuyang Zhi, Qimeng Wang, Yan Gao, Yi Wu, Yao Hu, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
arXiv:2606. 22437v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We conduct a systematic study of 18 widely used vision-language benchmarks and identify three major issues: 1) many items do not rely on visual cues and therefore fail to effectively measure multimodal understanding; 2) many items are already close to performance saturation for current LVLMs, which limits their discriminative power; 3) a small number of anomalous items affect the reliability of evaluation results.
By Wenzhen Yuan, Jiacheng Ruan, Wutao Xiong, Chengping Zhao, Ting Liu, Yuzhuo Fu
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:2609.05916v1 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