arXiv Machine Learning By Jaehyuk Lee, Hanyoung Kim, Yanggee Kim, Donghun Lee

ASAP: Attention Sink Anchored Pruning

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ASAP (Attention Sink Anchored Pruning) is a training‑free framework designed to reduce the computational burden of Vision Transformers by addressing the attention sink problem. It models ViT information flow as a Lazy Random Walk, identifies the sink as a dominant probability accumulator, and uses diffusion distance to partition tokens via Radial Diffusion Clustering. The method then compresses background redundancy through Transition Weight Pooling, achieving up to 48% throughput acceleration while maintaining or improving accuracy across image, video, and vision‑language tasks.

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