arXiv AI
Sep 2

SinkPruner: Sink-Free Visual Token Pruning for Multimodal Large Language Models

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