arXiv AI By Tianhao Fu, Austin Wang, Charles Chen, Roby Aldave-Garza, Victor Xie, Xiyue Jiao, Yucheng Chen, Martin Tin

Just Respect the Semantics: Image-Token Compression via Pre-LLM Semantic Variable-Resolution Tokenization and In-LLM Relevance Pruning

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The paper introduces Varest, a method for image-token compression that reduces computational load while preserving semantic integrity. Varest uses variable-resolution tokenization guided by semantic fungibility, merging tokens within coherent regions coarsely and maintaining finer distinctions at object boundaries and text. After early decoder processing, learned relevance registers prune visual tokens, enabling a single checkpoint to perform well across multiple budgets and backbones, achieving 86.10‑92.33% of full-token performance with only 5.56% of the original token count.

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