The paper introduces a training‑free visual token pruning strategy for vision‑language models that separates early vision‑guided pruning from later text‑guided reselection. By first pruning tokens with vision‑encoder attention, retaining candidates until the decoder midpoint, and then applying text‑to‑visual attention, the method preserves task‑relevant visual information. Across eight benchmarks and three models, it achieves an average performance recovery of 11.10 and 16.84 percentage points at 80% and 90% pruning, respectively, while maintaining comparable or lower LLM‑prefill latency.
arXiv:2609.37581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding and reasoning but often incur substantial inference costs due to the large number of visu...
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: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...
arXiv:2606. 03569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but suffer from significant computational overhead during inference.
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...
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but suffer from significant computational overhead during inference. While visual token pruning offers a promising solution, existing methods predominantly rely on initial attention scores.
arXiv:2608. 04496v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual inputs in vision-language models (VLMs) are often encoded into substantially longer token sequences than text, making visual tokens a major bottleneck for efficient inference.
Abundant visual information strengthens vision-language model (VLM) perception, yet massive visual tokens raise inference costs. Existing visual token pruning methods rely on similarity-based guidance, which exploits pairwise text-vision and vision-vision token correlations for compression.
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:2609.36916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) incur high inference latency from long visual token sequences. Existing pruning methods commonly use attention...
arXiv:2608.06411v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse vision-language tasks, but their efficiency is limited by...