arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 1

MiCo: Mutual Information Coverage Optimization through Semantic Erasure Modeling for Efficient MLLM Inference

arXiv:2609.34330v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in multimodal understanding, but processing large numbers of visu...

By Tinghao Wang, Yichen Guo, Qizhe Zhang, Yuan Zhang, Weimin Ouyang, Rui Huang, Jiajun Cao, Sixiang Chen, Hao Jiang, Jixian Wu, Zheng Lu, Bofan Zhu, Renyuan Li, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

STAR-Pro: Stage-Wise Token Adaptive Reduction with Progressive Refinement for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models

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 Computer Vision
Sep 23

From Token Importance to Conditional Removability: Rethinking Visual Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper argues that token importance alone is insufficient to determine safe removal of visual tokens in multimodal large language models, because removability depends on representation depth and the surrounding deletion set. Through controlled experiments, the authors show that the same tokens can have different effects when removed at different depths or contexts. They introduce CoRePrune, a training‑free two‑stage pruning framework that refreshes deletion effects as visual representations evolve and refines candidate tokens based on the current deletion set, achieving high performance retention across multiple backbones and reducing prefill time significantly.

By Shengli He, Yongchao Liang, Roumeng He, Junjie Zeng, Jiyuan He, Xin Fang, Can Wu, Li Zheng
arXiv AI
Oct 2

MWOP: Modality-aware Width-wise Operation Pruning for Efficient MLLMs

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