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
arXiv AI
6d ago

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
Sep 18

QCPruner: Query-Conditioned Population Coverage for Visual Token Pruning

QCPruner is a training‑free visual token pruning method that conditions both token selection and representation on the query via bilateral utility weighting. It fuses keyword‑matched query anchors with cross‑modal cues to compute a nonnegative facility‑location objective that is monotone and submodular, guaranteeing a (1‑1/e) greedy approximation. Across multiple multimodal large language models, QCPruner consistently outperforms existing pruning methods, achieving over 96% of unpruned performance even with very few tokens retained.

By Shengli He (Guizhou University), Yongchao Liang (Guizhou University), Roumeng He (Shanghai Ocean University), Junjie Zeng (Guizhou University), Jiyuan He (Guizhou University), Can Wu (Guizhou University), Li Zheng (Guizhou University)
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