The paper introduces Role-Conditioned Sub-Token Routing (RoleSub), a method that compresses the value representations of retained tokens in Vision‑Language‑Action models. By partitioning each token’s value into orthogonal groups and routing them based on token features, latent roles, and language context, RoleSub can compress both visual and language representations without discarding tokens. Experiments on OpenVLA‑OFT‑7B show that, at matched visual‑KV budgets, RoleSub outperforms token‑only control in most settings and can reduce total KV to 9.2–11.3% of the original while maintaining strong control performance.
arXiv:2609.15131v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) require substantial computation to process numerous visual tokens across all transformer layers. Most method...
By Yuyao Sun, Tao Deng, Shuang Li, Deqing Wang
arXiv:2608. 07193v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual-token pruning can substantially reduce the inference cost of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), yet existing methods largely rely on fixed, handcrafted heuristics and costly expert trial and error.
By Zhen Liu, Wenli Huang, Wei Song, Yuhan Liu, Zhiqin Yang, Jingwen Fu
The paper "ActionCodec: What Makes for Good Action Tokenizers" addresses the lack of design guidance for action tokenization in Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models. By deriving information‑theoretic principles—maximizing temporal token overlap, reducing vocabulary redundancy, boosting multimodal mutual information, and ensuring token independence—the authors propose ActionCodec, a tokenizer that improves training efficiency and VLA performance. Experiments show that a SmolVLM2‑2.2B fine‑tuned with ActionCodec reaches a 95.5 % success rate on LIBERO, rising to 97.4 % with architectural tweaks, setting a new state‑of‑the‑art for VLA models without robotics pre‑training.
By Zibin Dong, Yicheng Liu, Shiduo Zhang, Baijun Ye, Yifu Yuan, Fei Ni, Jingjing Gong, Xipeng Qiu, Hang Zhao, Yinchuan Li, Jianye Hao
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
VisionWeave introduces elastic visual representation weaving, a native capability for multimodal large language models that learns where and at what granularity to encode visual information. The method combines a gated spatial pooler for coarse representations with a granularity router that allocates content‑adaptive token usage, trained end‑to‑end on large‑scale data. Experiments on Qwen3.5‑4B and Qwen3.8‑27B show that VisionWeave can save 43.0% of tokens while preserving 98.9% of performance across eight benchmarks, and delivers significant throughput gains and latency reductions when deployed on the SGLang serving engine.
By Yuan Feng, Qize Yang, Ruizhe Chen, Sibo Song, Haolin He, Muzhi Zhu, Zihan Liu, Yunfei Chu, Xize Cheng, Yuxuan Wang, Jin Xu, Xike Xie
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
arXiv:2610.08133v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong robotic manipulation performance but incur high computational costs from processing long token seq...
By Owen Du, Yang Yue, Jie Zhang, Jiaqi Pi, Chi Bene Chen, Gao Huang
arXiv:2609.32353v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Visual token reduction is an effective way to accelerate multimodal large language models (MLLMs), but performance deteriorates rapidly under extre...
By Junxian Li, Ruixuan Yang, Tianao Zhang, Tiange Xu, Weisheng Dong, Yulun Zhang
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:2608.21247v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Token compression has become a key technique for reducing the inference cost of large foundation models, with approaches such as token pruning and KV-c...
By Zhuoyuan Li, Rui Zhao, Jin Wang, Hanwei Zhu, Cong Zhang, Giuseppe Valenzise, Weisi Lin, Kin-Man Lam
ERASE is an adaptive two-stage token pruning framework designed to reduce computational overhead in Vision‑Language Models by eliminating redundant visual tokens. Stage 1 removes image‑level redundancy using lightweight raw‑image statistics, while Stage 2 progressively prunes instruction‑irrelevant tokens across decoder layers. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B show that ERASE retains 95.70 % of the original accuracy while keeping only 25 % of the tokens.
By Yuna Lee, Kyoungho Min, Yulhwa Kim