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 Computer Vision
Aug 28

Multi-Image Visual Token Pruning in Large Visual Language Models

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 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 AI
Oct 2

VETO: Video Efficient Token Optimization for Vision Language Models

VETO (Video Efficient Token Optimization for Vision Language Models) is a plug‑in that reduces the quadratic cost of visual tokens in long‑video inference by applying dual‑axis compression: an intra‑frame compressor merges semantically similar tokens within each frame, and an inter‑frame compressor merges temporally redundant frames. By first compressing spatial dimensions, VETO lowers the cost of subsequent global temporal matching, surpassing single‑axis methods and achieving up to 45% faster inference on models such as LLaVA‑OneVision‑7B while maintaining or improving accuracy. The approach is universally applicable across LLaVA‑OneVision, InternVL‑2.5, and LongVA, preserving or enhancing zero‑shot accuracy even under extreme token budgets.

By Gueter Josmy Faure, Hao Ping Wang, Min-Hung Chen, Winston H. Hsu