arXiv AI

When 1+1 Backfires: Rethinking Relevance-Diversity Balancing for Sample-Aware Visual Token Reduction

arXiv AI
Jun 26

TOPS: First-Principles Visual Token Pruning via Constructing Token Optimal Preservation Sets for Efficient MLLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 27161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, but their efficiency is limited by the large number of visual tokens, which introduces substantial computational overhead.

By Tinghao Wang, Yichen Guo, Rui Huang, Zheng Lu, Qizhe Zhang, Chenxi Li, Yuan Zhang, Jiajun Cao, Zhirong Shen, Yaosong Du, Guangyan Gan, Wenya Wang, Lin William Cong, Shanghang Zhang
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 Computation and Language
Aug 28

ET-Prune: Evidence-Aware Dynamic Budgeting for Visual Token Pruning in Text-Rich MLLMs

ET‑Prune is a training‑free framework that dynamically allocates visual token budgets in multimodal large language models based on question‑conditioned evidence. It protects text‑like spatial regions, converts evidence uncertainty into a token floor, and progressively prunes concentrated evidence while retaining diffuse or text‑dense tokens. In six backbone‑benchmark comparisons, ET‑Prune matches or outperforms other pruned methods while keeping roughly half the visual tokens, achieving notable gains on OCRBench‑v2 and MMBench v1.1.

By Zizhong Ding, Junxian Li, Kai Liu, Shaoqiu Zhang, Xiao Xiao, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 19

CatchUp: Depth-Aware Re-Admission of Visual Tokens for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models

CatchUp is a training‑free framework that improves efficiency in large vision‑language models by depth‑aware re‑admission of visual tokens. It repeatedly evaluates query‑conditioned relevance, processes only selected tokens per decoder interval, and preserves deferred tokens for later re‑admission, using reference‑to‑current transition signals to approximate missed representation evolution. Experiments on three referring‑expression grounding datasets and six multimodal benchmarks show that CatchUp retains over 92% of full‑model performance with 88.9% fewer active tokens and reduces end‑to‑end latency by 8.0% at a 64‑token budget.

By Eunju Park, Uiwon Hwang