MWOP (Modality-aware Width-wise Operation Pruning) is a method that independently prunes visual‑to‑visual, text‑to‑visual, and text‑to‑text attention paths within each layer of multimodal large language models, and separately selects feed‑forward network channels for visual and textual inputs. It uses a first‑order Taylor criterion to guide pruning, re‑evaluates FFN importance after attention pruning, and applies LoRA‑based recovery training. The approach is paired with path‑sparse Triton attention kernels and compact visual‑side FFN execution to achieve practical acceleration, preserving token sequences while reducing computation.
"whyItMatters":"MWOP achieves a 1.6× prefill speedup on LLaVA‑OneVision‑7B while retaining 99.7% performance, and further boosts token‑compression methods to 2.9× and 2.7× speedups, demonstrating its effectiveness across architectures."
By Xudong Wang, Hao Wu, Haozhe Hu, Peiran Yin, Xinghao Chen, Yunpu Ma, Wei Zhang, Xiaoyu Shen
The paper introduces Adaptive Visual Token Pruning (AVTP), a training‑free framework that dynamically selects pruning layers and ratios for large vision‑language models (LVLMs) when processing multiple image sequences. By analyzing visual attention distributions across different LVLM architectures, AVTP adapts token retention to image importance, enabling efficient inference without relying on attention‑based computations incompatible with FlashAttention. Experiments show significant speedups—up to 2× for Qwen3VL‑8B—while preserving or even improving accuracy on multi‑image benchmarks.
By Rongyang Zhang, Chengqiang Lu, Cong Li, Hongchao Gu, Tingjia Shen, Xuyang Zhi, Qimeng Wang, Yan Gao, Yi Wu, Yao Hu, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
arXiv:2609.10346v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) process hundreds or thousands of visual tokens per image, incurring prohibitive inference costs. While existin...
By Haiji Liang, Pengfei Zhou, Zhenglin Wan, Wei Wang, Yang You, Wangbo Zhao
arXiv:2609.05916v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve strong multimodal understanding, but the hundreds to thousands of visual tokens they process impose subs...
By Yichen Guo, Tinghao Wang, Qizhe Zhang, Lingbei Meng, Yuan Zhang, Jiajun Cao, Hao Jiang, Chenwei Wu, Jixian Wu, Sixiang Chen, Tao Luo, Hongyang Cheng, Kai Tang, Chenxi Li, Renyuan Li, Xiande Huang, Wenya Wang, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv:2508.03351v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse language tasks, motivating their extension to vision-la...
By Yufei Xue, Yushi Huang, Lunjie Zhu, Jiawei Shao, Jun Zhang
arXiv:2603. 00198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Token reduction accelerates long-video vision--language models (VLMs), but existing methods target Transformers, where reduction is treated as token pruning.
By Jindong Jiang, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Karan Sapra, Zhiding Yu, Guilin Liu, Andrew Tao, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Wonmin Byeon