arXiv AI
Oct 28

LearnPrunerV2: Learnable Progressive Token Pruning for Vision-Language Models

LearnPrunerV2 is a fully learnable token‑pruning framework for Vision‑Language Models that replaces heuristic pruning with lightweight modules in every backbone layer. These modules estimate token importance by combining visual saliency and query relevance via a shadow token, revealing a consistent staircase redundancy pattern across layers. The method introduces Budget‑Deterministic Pruning to set fixed per‑layer budgets, achieving state‑of‑the‑art efficiency while preserving 99.8% of performance even after pruning 77.8% of visual tokens on LLaVA‑v1.5.

By Rinyoichi Takezoe, Yaqian Li, Weiren Wang, Zihao Bo, Huihong Shi, Anzhou Hou, Mo Guang, Jiale Yan, Kaiwen Long
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Not All Attention Heads Contribute to Critical Visual Token Selection: Head-Aware Pruning Matters More

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.

By Chaofang Ma, Lin Jiang, Carol Jingyi Li, Xingyu Liu, Zeyu Li, Jiang Xu, Wei Zhang