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: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:2608. 19285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have enhanced the capabilities of pre-trained LLMs by adding vision tokens alongside text, with approaches like LLaVA showing impressive results.
By Baptiste Rossigneux, Inna Kucher, Vincent Lorrain, Emmanuel Casseau
SinkPruner is a training‑free framework that prunes visual tokens for multimodal large language models by first removing high‑norm redundant tokens with a visual sanitizer and then selectively keeping tokens that align with the text query using a text‑guided pruner. The coarse‑to‑fine design reduces attention sink and dispersion, enabling an 89% token reduction while preserving 96.5% of LLaVA‑1.5’s performance and 91.8% of Qwen2.5‑VL’s performance across twelve image‑language and four video‑language benchmarks. The visual sanitizer also improves existing pruning methods, showing strong transferability.
By Shiyu Li, Zi-Yuan Hu, Shijia Huang, Yanyang Li, Yiwu Zhong, Liwei Wang
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:2606. 27161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, but their efficiency is limited by the large number of visual tokens, which introduces substantial computational overhead.
By Tinghao Wang, Yichen Guo, Rui Huang, Zheng Lu, Qizhe Zhang, Chenxi Li, Yuan Zhang, Jiajun Cao, Zhirong Shen, Yaosong Du, Guangyan Gan, Wenya Wang, Lin William Cong, Shanghang Zhang