Large vision-language models used as listwise rerankers must jointly process visual tokens from tens of candidates per query, making token pruning essential for practical deployment. Existing pruning methods retain tokens by attention saliency, yet we show that saliency is systematically misaligned with ranking contribution: visually prominent tokens often capture order-neutral patterns shared across candidates. This mismatch is layer-dependent: saliency becomes informative only where attention is concentrated, and normalized attention entropy diagnoses the reliability shift (Pearson r=0.87). We propose RaDiCal (Rank-Discriminative Calibration), a training-free framework that uses normalized attention entropy to decide when saliency can be trusted, fusing it with an attention-free rank-discriminative prior and selecting pruning layers from the same trust landscape. Across three retrieval benchmarks and multiple VLM architectures, RaDiCal matches Dense MRR@10 on Flickr30K and surpasses it on MSCOCO at a 20% token budget, ranks first among all pruning methods on FashionIQ, and holds within 1.2 pp on Flickr30K and MSCOCO at 10% retention. It cuts FLOPs by 39--45% and delivers 1.28--1.45$\times$ measured speedups across two VLM architectures without dataset-specific retuning.
Transformer-based object trackers are renowned for their strong performance, yet dense token processing often leads to prohibitive computational cost, limiting real-time deployment on edge devices. While recent works explore token pruning to reduce computation, they often stop short of an end-to-end sparse pipeline, as early-layer token scores can be noisy without a motion prior, and many trackers ultimately fall back to dense reshaping to feed the dense prediction head that partially negates the savings. We introduce Motion-aware Sparse Tracker (MaST), a sparse tracking framework that makes sparsity effective from tokens to boxes. First, MaST injects a lightweight motion prior to refine cross-attention-based importance scores, enabling earlier and more stable token reduction in the search region. Second, we introduce a natively sparse prediction head that operates directly on the retained unstructured tokens with a score-first, regress-once design, eliminating dense padding/reshaping and reducing redundant computation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MaST establishes new state of the art among lightweight trackers, where MaST-tiny attains 63.8 AUC on LaSOT and 80.1 SUC on TrackingNet, surpassing the prior best AsymTrack-S by +1.0 AUC and +2.2 SUC while running at 152 FPS on Jetson Nano, nearly twice as fast as AsymTrack-S at 88 FPS. Code is available at https://github.com/TsingWei/MaST.
We introduce RS$^3$-Prune, a training-free token-pruning recipe that instantiates as a small set of inference time hooks atop existing video object segmentation (VOS) networks. Modern VOS models have converged on a common, expensive design: an image encoder produces a dense token grid for every frame, and a memory bank accumulates these tokens across all previously processed frames to condition future predictions. As a video grows longer, the resulting token budget governs both per-frame latency and peak GPU memory. Hence these models break on use cases such as --- long-form video or real-time deployment on memory-bounded accelerators. In this work we argue that the right axis along which to compress memory-bank VOS is the token budget itself. RS$^3$-Prune operates in two precise locations within an arbitrary memory-bank VOS pipeline: at the boundary between the image encoder and the memory-attention readout, where we restrict the queries that participate in the cross-frame attention to only a small, geometrically informed subset; and at the boundary between the memory encoder and the memory bank, where we restrict which tokens are ever permitted to enter the bank to those that lie within the object's spatial extent. Over various established benchmarks, RS$^3$-Prune delivers up to $38.8\%$ FPS speedup and reduces $13.1\%$ peak memory usage, while preserving a competitive $\mathcal{J}$&$\mathcal{F}$ compared to the unmodified VOS networks.
Baptiste Rossigneux, Inna Kucher, Vincent Lorrain +1cs.CV cs.LG
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. However, the computational burden of processing up to 576 or 729 visual tokens makes edge deployment challenging. While various token pruning techniques require retraining, some are training-free and thus can easily adapt to architecture changes. We introduce ClustRS, a two-part, training-free algorithm for robust token pruning. Its first component is an attention-weighted, clustering algorithm that selects representative tokens from each semantic cluster. The second component, Residual Shrinkage, is a one-pass denoising step on the selected tokens. These training-free lightweight steps make LLaVA ready for real-world data, improving robustness to a wide range of image-noise types and intensities. Experimental results on the ScienceQA-IMG and MM-VET benchmarks show our method outperforms attention- and diversity-based methods by up to 20\% under extreme noise and token conditions (reducing tokens by 97\%, down to 16 tokens) on LLaVA 1.5 7b and achieves exceptional results on LLaVA-OneVision, where we match baseline performance with fewer than one-third of their tokens under mild noise conditions. Our study demonstrates a simple yet powerful alternative to both score-only and diversity-only pruning rules, paving the way for compute-efficient and noise-resilient VLM deployment.
RS-LVLMs have advanced multimodal understanding of Earth observation imagery, yet their performance is fundamentally constrained by high-resolution processing, as visual token counts grow quadratically with linear input resolution while important visual evidence is inherently sparse and increasingly diluted across the expanded sequence. Existing token pruning methods largely rely on scale-agnostic resolution policies and isolated importance cues, limiting task-aligned granularity adaptation and holistic evidence preservation. To address this, we present Scale-Adaptive and Geospatial Evidence-Modulated Token Pruning (SA-GEM), a plug-and-play framework that unifies task-adaptive token granularity allocation with holistic geospatial token importance modulation. Specifically, a lightweight router selects the resolution based on query-dependent token granularity, while a token importance modulator jointly models task relevance, spatial structure, and local redundancy to preserve holistic geospatial evidence. We show that higher resolution is not universally beneficial and, once sufficient granularity is reached, token quality matters more than token quantity. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that SA-GEM achieves consistent gains in both accuracy and efficiency over existing pruning methods. On XLRS-Bench, it surpasses GeoLLaVA-8K by 2.3% in accuracy with a 2.4 times total inference speedup.
While 3D Vision-Language Models (3D VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable spatial reasoning capabilities, they suffer from massive visual token counts that create severe computational bottlenecks during inference. Existing token pruning methods primarily rely on diversity-based selection, discarding similar tokens to maximize dispersion. However, in 3D environments, this approach frequently drops representative prototype tokens in favor of outliers, breaking the multi-view consistencies and geometric structures essential for spatial reasoning. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift for 3D VLM token pruning: from maximizing diversity to preserving visual evidence coverage. We introduce CoverPrune, a training-free framework that formulates inference-time token pruning as an Optimal Transport (OT) problem. To overcome the intractable combinatorial subset selection inherent in this formulation, we design the Feature-Spatial-Temporal (FST) transport cost and target capacity, along with an efficient Spatial-Guided Greedy Selection (SGS) algorithm to approximate the OT objective. Furthermore, we propose CoverPrune-Lite, an accelerated variant utilizing spatially structured local matching for minimal overhead. Extensive experiments across multiple 3D visual-spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art token efficiency, maintaining robust reasoning performance even under highly aggressive pruning budgets. Visit our project website at https://github.com/Brucess/CoverPrune.
Token-pruning policies are usually designed for a single recognition pipeline, but pretrained Vision Transformers are reused across tasks with different spatial demands. We ask which parts of a pruning policy transfer across image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. For each pipeline, controlled probes freeze the no-pruning checkpoint and apply a series of parameter-free reduction criteria at one eligible layer at a time without retraining. The probes reveal three differences: segmentation and detection rank the criteria differently, classification is especially sensitive to attention-based pruning in the earliest layers, and the dense tasks prefer opposite recovery endpoints. These findings motivate Task-Adaptive Pruning (TAP). Existing register tokens serve as task-agnostic storage for feature artifacts. TAP instead introduces one task register per task and activates only the current one. Its evolving state ranks tokens, distributes an exact removal budget over depth, and sets the recovery scale for dense features. At a final keep rate of $ρ=0.5$, our jointly adapted model, TAP-J, reaches $47.0$ mIoU at $1.30\times$ encoder throughput on ADE20K and $53.7$ box AP at $1.32\times$ encoder throughput on COCO while remaining competitive on ImageNet-1K.
Kyeongyoon Lee, Hongyeob Kim, Youngeun Kim +1cs.AI cs.MM cs.SD
Omni-modal LLMs jointly process audio, video, and text, but long multimodal sequences incur substantial prefill and KV-cache costs. Existing omni-modal compression methods primarily focus on pre-LLM token reduction, leaving modality-specific compression across the LLM boundary underexplored. We propose A-PACK, a two-stage framework that defers audio pruning until query-conditioned multimodal interactions emerge. Our analysis shows that audio exhibits higher task-relevant information density and representational diversity per token than video. We further find that local audio-visual dynamics provide a more effective cue for visual selection than token-wise matching. We therefore preserve audio and compress video with local dynamics before the LLM, then progressively prune low-relevance audio and visual tokens and their KV-cache entries inside the LLM. Across four benchmarks on Qwen2.5-Omni-7B/3B, A-PACK achieves the strongest average performance among the evaluated prior methods while reducing prefill FLOPs by up to 78% and improving decoding throughput by up to 2.21x.
To adopt the Vision Transformers (ViTs) in resource-constrained environment, token pruning is widely used to reduce computational cost without impacting accuracy. However, adversaries have developed targeted attacks against said token pruning techniques to undermine such attempts to make ViTs efficient. In this paper, we propose MOAT, a model-agnostic pre-processing defense pipeline that applies a combination of input transformations to protect efficient ViT implementations against adversarial efficiency attacks. MOAT operates directly on the input without requiring modifications to the model architecture or token pruning mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that, across all evaluated ViT models, MOAT limits GFLOPs degradation under adversarial attacks to within 3.4% of the original unattacked model.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) increasingly rely on input-adaptive inference, such as token pruning and early halting, to meet energy and latency budgets. This survey examines a recent class of adversarial efficiency degradation attacks that target these mechanisms to increase computation without necessarily degrading accuracy. We unify and compare two representative attacks, SlowFormer (a universal adversarial patch) and DeSparsify (per-image perturbations), across three popular token-pruning frameworks: A-ViT, ATS, and AdaViT. We standardize reporting using GFLOPs, accuracy loss, and an Attack Success (AS) metric that measures how much of the model's compute savings the attack takes away. Understanding these attacks is crucial for designing countermeasures that not only mitigate risk but also remain lightweight, since deployment often occurs in low-power settings such as mobile or embedded devices. To organize our analysis, we focus on three questions: how input-adaptive optimizations (e.g., token pruning and early halting) create attack surfaces for efficiency degradation; how such attacks operate in practice and which optimizations are most vulnerable; and which defenses exist today and whether they meaningfully restore efficiency under attack.
Zero-shot visual anomaly detection has achieved remarkable progress, with recent vision-only approaches further improving performance while simplifying the inference pipeline. However, existing methods typically perform dense computation over all images and spatial tokens, despite the fact that normal samples dominate real-world scenarios and anomalies usually occupy only small regions. Token pruning offers a promising solution, but introduces an asymmetric pruning risk in anomaly detection: retaining normal tokens mainly incurs redundant computation, whereas removing anomalous tokens may eliminate the only evidence for detection and localization. This risk is particularly severe in early layers, where pruning provides the greatest computational benefit but anomaly semantics remain unreliable. We propose KeepAD, a defect-preserving token pruning framework that formulates token selection as high-recall, anomaly-aware routing. In shallow layers, KeepAD combines coverage-preserving selection over local $2\times2$ patch neighborhoods with deterministic anomaly rescue to reduce the risk of discarding subtle defects. In deeper layers, frozen normal and abnormal prototypes guide pruning under an image-adaptive token budget, aggressively removing low-risk normal tokens while preserving local anomaly evidence. Dense-to-sparse self-distillation further supervises early token routing without introducing additional inference overhead. Experiments on six industrial and seven medical zero-shot anomaly detection benchmarks show that KeepAD reduces the token retention ratio to below $20\%$, while limiting the average degradation in image-level and pixel-level AUROC to within $2.7$ percentage points. At the most aggressive operating point, KeepAD achieves a $7.9\times$ speedup over the strongest CLIP-based baseline.
Mengjie Zhang, Qihui Zhu, Tao Zhang +10cs.CV cs.CL
Video large language models (VideoLLMs) achieve strong video understanding performance, but their inference remains expensive due to the large number of redundant spatio-temporal visual tokens in long videos. Existing token pruning methods alleviate this cost by reducing redundant tokens, yet most of them rely on segment-level local pruning, where videos are partitioned into isolated segments and tokens are selected independently within each segment. Such designs may under-preserve short but semantically dense segments and discard tokens that appear non-salient locally but remain critical from a global perspective. To address this issue, we propose GSTEP (Global Spatio-Temporal Density Pruning), a plug-and-play pruning framework that models video as a continuous spatio-temporal information flow. GSTEP constructs a token-level spatio-temporal density by combining a continuous temporal density, obtained from a smoothed centered frame-level change signal, with intra-frame spatial density, and then performs global token sampling by jointly balancing information density and coverage. Extensive experiments on multiple VideoLLMs and public benchmarks demonstrate that GSTEP consistently achieves strong accuracy-efficiency trade-offs and generalizes well across model architectures and evaluation settings. On LLaVA-OneVision-7B, GSTEP prunes 75% of visual tokens, preserves up to 100.2% of the original average performance across benchmarks, and achieves a 1.17 end-to-end speedup.
Visual token pruning reduces the computational cost of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by removing redundant visual tokens. The key is to learn a score that measures whether a token is useful. Existing methods typically rely on Gumbel-Softmax to approximate discrete selection during training. Such selectors make the score depend on the behavior of a relaxed pruning operator, not directly on the consequence of information loss. In this paper, we propose DiffPrune, which gives token scores a direct meaning. During training, DiffPrune keeps all tokens and weakens each token's information according to its score. If weakening a token hurts the task, the scorer is pushed to protect it; if not, the token can receive a lower score. Because the loss is differentiated through this actual information-throttling path, the scorer avoids the unstable surrogate path of relaxed token selection. DiffPrune implements this idea with an Information Throttler, which injects variance-preserving noise into visual tokens, where high-score tokens remain close to their original representations, while low-score tokens carry less original information. At inference, the throttler is removed, and hard top-K pruning is applied using the learned scores. Across ten VLM benchmarks, DiffPrune retains 96.5% of full-model accuracy while accelerating LLM prefill by 2.85x, with only 0.69 ms inference overhead. Code will be publicly available.
Embodied agents replan frequently to recover from execution drift, partial observability, and coordination hazards, but each LLM-based replanning call can consume an accumulated textual context that grows over time and across agents. Once this context becomes large, replanning latency develops heavy tails and can miss real-time deadlines even when task success remains high, a failure mode that is hard to detect from average latency or success alone. We present BRACE, a controller that formulates replanning as a budgeted control loop by deciding whether to replan, selecting a replanning mode, and allocating an explicit token budget and latency service-level objective (SLO) while accounting for optional efficiency modules. As a reusable component, we introduce E-RECAP, a cost-aware progressive token pruning method that predicts token utility and prunes replanning contexts across transformer layers while preserving critical head and tail tokens. Across Meta Habitat, RoboFactory, and AirSim, BRACE with E-RECAP reduces replanning-call token counts by 62-92% and SLO violation rates from 85.5-100.0% to 4.7-50.0% in settings where task success is already saturated. In a harder RoboFactory setting where open-loop, frozen-plan, and No BRACE all fail, BRACE + E-RECAP reaches 80.0% success with 4.6% SLO violations, demonstrating that tail-aware per-call budgeting is effective across embodied platforms.
While visual token pruning is essential for efficient Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), existing training-free methods suffer from a critical limitation: they rely on static, instantaneous heuristics to perform irreversible filtering. This approach ignores the hierarchical nature of MLLMs, where token importance often evolves dynamically rather than remaining fixed across layers. Consequently, tokens essential for deep-layer reasoning are often prematurely discarded by shallow-layer estimates. To address this, we propose Trend-aware Pruning, a novel framework that elevates pruning from a local snapshot decision to a temporal trajectory modeling problem. Instead of relying on isolated scores, our method captures the momentum of attention flow. This enables a dynamic rectification mechanism that selectively reactivates "late-blooming" tokens, those initially undervalued but exhibiting rising semantic importance, thereby preventing the loss of critical visual cues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves a superior efficiency-performance trade-off across diverse multimodal tasks. Notably, it reduces visual tokens by over 77.8%, retaining only approximately 23 tokens in the final layer while maintaining competitive performance, offering a robust and reversible solution for high-efficiency multimodal inference.
Gigapixel Whole-Slide Images (WSIs) present a fundamental computational bottleneck for vision-language models (VLMs) due to extreme sequence lengths. Existing approaches predominantly rely on spatial sampling or training-free pruning, which risk diluting weak but informative signals, leading to the loss of critical diagnostic evidence due to the spatially diffuse nature of pathological cues. We reformulate WSI token pruning as a sequential selection process, enabling the model to autonomously learn an optimal routing strategy rather than relying on static heuristics. We herein propose a decoupled routing framework integrated as an active plugin into the fully pre-trained SlideChat base model, leaving both the slide encoder and large language model frozen. To provide continuous gradients for the non-differentiable pruning operation during training, we introduce PathSelect. PathSelect employs a variance-preserving noise gate to modulate each patch's information flow via a differentiable Soft Top-K operator, paired with a diagonal-attention Denoiser that recovers the perturbed representations without semantic leakage. At inference, the PathSelect module is entirely detached. Relying solely on the trained Scorer, a deterministic Hard Top-K operator executes adaptive, data-dependent trajectory termination, significantly accelerating downstream generative processing with exceptionally low sequential token selection latency. Driven by an empirical average of only 44.86 tokens under a maximum constraint of K = 128, our framework achieves 74.00% overall accuracy on SlideBench (TCGA), representing an approximate 36.6x spatial token reduction relative to the uncompressed baseline average while consistently outperforming sampling-based counterparts.
Multi-modal object Re-Identification (ReID) aims to retrieve specific objects by integrating complementary information from multiple modalities. However, existing multi-modal ReID methods do not effectively address background interference suppression or achieve tri-modal alignment, instead focusing on pairwise feature fusion. Moreover, many current aggregation approaches suffer from high computational complexity. To address these limitations, we propose PRISM, a novel multi-modal ReID framework built upon Prompt-S6 (PS6) and semantic-aware knowledge guidance. PS6 maintains the linear complexity and strong sequence modeling capability of Mamba while enabling efficient cross-modal interaction. Leveraging these advantages, we design two key components: Semantic-Driven Token Pruning (SDTP) and Progressive Fusion Network (PFN). Parsing semantic priors from the segmentation foundation models, the SDTP then leverages these priors and applies dynamic token pruning to suppress background noise and refine feature representations. The PFN progressively aggregates multi-modal features to achieve tri-modal alignment and fully exploit modality complementarity. With the proposed modules, PRISM generates more robust multi-modal representations under complex scenarios. Extensive experiments on four multi-modal object ReID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. The source code is available at https://github.com/zw-absin/PRISM.
Omnimodal large language models (OmniLLMs) are rapidly extending multimodal reasoning to cover synchronized audio and video. However, the resulting audio-video token sequences are long, leading to high prefill latency and GPU memory usage at inference time. Existing token pruning methods, designed mainly for vision-only inputs, miss both the cross-modal links between audio and video and the user query that decides which content matters. To bridge this gap, we present Omni-Prune, a training-free, query-aware audio-visual token pruning framework that jointly removes redundancy from both modalities while keeping task-relevant cross-modal evidence. Specifically, Omni-Prune first splits the token sequence into adaptive time windows placed at audio saliency peaks, then scores audio and video tokens on a single scale that combines encoder attention with text-query relevance, and pairs related audio-video tokens so that they are kept together. Within each window, a final K-medoids step then selects a few representative tokens, adding diverse cues that score-based selection alone would miss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Omni-Prune outperforms established baseline methods, delivering up to 3.25x prefill speedup and 1.3x memory reduction while retaining over 99% of full-model performance.
Recent high-resolution Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) generate thousands of visual tokens per input, leading to a visual token explosion that introduces severe latency bottlenecks. While token pruning mitigates this issue, state-of-the-art subset-optimization methods typically rely on iterative subset construction to jointly capture visual diversity and instruction relevance. As visual token counts scale, this sequential dependency introduces significant selection overhead, severely limiting the translation of theoretical FLOPs reductions into actual wall-clock speedups. To address this limitation, we propose Single-Forward Pruner (SFPruner), a structural reformulation of visual token pruning that embeds redundancy control directly into the scoring space, bypassing the need for iterative combinatorial optimization. Our non-iterative framework achieves redundancy-aware importance selection in a single forward pass through two complementary mechanisms. First, to attenuate redundancy at the covariance level, we introduce a semantics-guided ridge leverage scheme. By integrating instruction relevance and visual saliency, this mechanism suppresses dominant covariance directions and mitigates representation bias. Second, ranking-based directional masking resolves residual overlap through asymmetric similarity competition, where higher-scoring tokens explicitly suppress redundant lower-scoring alternatives via parallel tensor operations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach maintains stable selection costs, reducing the token selection process by up to 110 ms, from 112.4 ms to just 2.5 ms at 512 tokens in Qwen2.5-VL. This structural efficiency successfully translates theoretical token reductions into tangible inference speedups while preserving highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art techniques under aggressive compression.
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong generation and reasoning performance, but the Transformer architecture incurs high inference cost. Existing acceleration methods often rely on task-specific fine-tuning or training from scratch, increasing adaptation cost and limiting cross-task usability. We present an Adaptive Depth Sparse Framework (AdaDSF) that converts off-the-shelf pre-trained LLMs into depth-sparse models without full retraining. Our key insight is that layers contribute unequally to representation transformation, characterized by the cosine similarity between layer input and output hidden states. Based on this, AdaDSF assigns layer-wise token retention ratios from similarity statistics, uses a lightweight router to select informative tokens at each layer, and introduces a feature-preserving alignment objective to match intermediate and final representations between sparse and dense models. On GPT-NeoX and Qwen2.5 over language modeling and commonsense reasoning, AdaDSF substantially reduces inference FLOPs while preserving performance close to dense counterparts. Under comparable sparsity, AdaDSF consistently yields smaller accuracy degradation than strong baselines including MoD, D-LLM, and DLO.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated strong performance across vision-language tasks. However, their high inference cost, arising from both the large number of input visual tokens and the heavy computation of the large language model (LLM), remains a key barrier to practical deployment. Recent work attempts to reduce the cost by adaptively optimizing individual dimensions, e.g., pruning redundant visual tokens or skipping LLM layers and heads. Nonetheless, prior approaches typically treat these dimensions independently and overlook a fundamental coupling: the available compute resources must be dynamically allocated across all dimensions based on the input content. To bridge the gap, we propose SmartVL, a unified adaptive inference framework that jointly controls vision token number and model compute capability in response to varying input contents and compute budgets. SmartVL introduces a vision-side token controller that dynamically selects informative visual tokens and an LLM-side compute controller that adaptively adjusts LLM computation. Importantly, these controllers are trained to coordinate with each other so that the overall inference cost satisfies a target budget. To allow this joint scheduling, we connect the controllers using a shared budget encoding and leverage a differentiable latency estimator for end-to-end training. This design enables SmartVL to learn cross-stage allocation strategies that adapt to both input complexity and runtime compute constraints. Experiments across multiple MLLM benchmarks demonstrate that, with joint scheduling, SmartVL consistently outperforms prior adaptive methods and achieves superior accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontiers. Project page: https://www.schaterji.io/publications/2026/jointtokencompute.
Vision Transformers process spatially redundant tokens efficiently only when coarse token summaries preserve the evidence required by exponential attention aggregation. We identify a boundary-minority underestimation failure in which a spatially small, high-response region contributes dominant Gibbs mass while remaining nearly invisible to a block mean. We formalize the failure through the discrepancy between normalized log-mean-exp free energy and mean summarization, prove that minority Gibbs mass can remain non-vanishing as its spatial support and mean contribution vanish, and characterize the limitations of finite-order moment corrections. Building on the resulting analysis, we introduce Boundary-Minority Free-Energy Adaptive Screening (BMFA), which constructs a hierarchical piecewise-constant approximation and recursively refines blocks according to a computable lower-bound increment of local free energy. Controlled synthetic tests, COCO and LVIS diagnostic probes, closed-loop DeiT-Tiny evaluations, and ImageNet-1K experiments establish a consistent evidence chain. BMFA reduces the mean synthetic underestimate from 2.582 to 0.261 at a 5.794% leaf ratio, lowers the COCO image-edge mean gap from 2.254 to 0.526, and preserves 71.520% ImageNet Top-1 accuracy at a 55.861% leaf ratio. The current prototype evaluates selection quality after full QK computation; the reported leaf ratio therefore characterizes representation granularity rather than verified sparse-kernel speedup.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance in multimodal understanding, yet remain challenging to deploy on resource-constrained edge devices due to the substantial computational overhead of processing numerous visual tokens. Token reduction is a promising direction for accelerating VLMs inference, but existing approaches either rely on attention maps that are incompatible with modern acceleration frameworks or depend on computationally intensive pairwise similarity comparisons, which undermine scalability and negate their practical benefits in deployment. In this paper, we propose an attention-free and lightweight token reduction framework as a plug-and-play module for VLMs, which preserves both important and diverse tokens to produce a compact visual representation. First, to enable attention-free importance estimation, we adopt an information-theoretic perspective and quantify token information using a novel entropy-based criterion, retaining those with more expressive and less degenerate feature representations. Second, to ensure diverse visual coverage in a lightweight manner, we introduce a transformation-induced consistency signal where similar tokens yield similar signals, such that sorting by this signal places similar tokens close to each other and enables stride-based selection to produce a diverse token set. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off, maintaining competitive performance under aggressive compression.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are costly at inference time because they must process long sequences of visual tokens. Existing token pruning methods often degrade under high compression by blindly discarding information, breaking spatial structure or collapsing diversity. We propose SpecFlow, a training-free framework that shifts the paradigm from destructive pruning to conservative condensation, strictly enforcing spatial coverage and statistical conservation to ensure stability. Treating visual tokens as nodes in a $k$NN graph, SpecFlow (i) computes a stable importance field via spectral heat flow to preserve structural coherence, (ii) allocates budgets via adaptive spatial partitioning to guarantee coverage, and (iii) aggregates discarded information into coreset sinks to maintain statistical conservation. The method is plug-and-play, requires no fine-tuning, and is compatible with FlashAttention. Experiments confirm that our SpecFlow outperforms SOTA methods across tasks, VLM architectures, and pruning ratios. Notably, LLaVA-1.5 with SpecFlow retains 95.6% of original performance despite pruning 88.9% of visual tokens, offering an exceptional efficiency-accuracy balance. Code is available at https://github.com/Lzy-dot/SpecFlow
Recent Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on 2D question answering tasks. However, extending these models to the 3D question answering remains challenging, as they typically require multiple views of the scene, which incurs substantial computational cost at inference. To mitigate this issue, existing solutions rely on strategic frame selection or token-merging algorithms that require preprocessing in advance all frames of the scene, i.e., an offline fashion. In contrast, we propose the first online token-pruning method that can be integrated seamlessly with current MLLM models for 3D question answering tasks, without additional training and with lower memory usage.Our key insight is to project each input frame into a shared voxel space using depth information and camera pose, identifying spatially-overlapped regions across frames and selectively pruning redundant image tokens before they enter the language model. Our method enables efficient online processing while reducing up to 50% of token usage. We apply this approach to Qwen2.5-VL-7B and Qwen3-VL-8B, demonstrating improved performance on the ScanQA, SQA3D, and OpenEQA-HM3D benchmarks.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often fail in fine-grained visual reasoning, as question-relevant visual cues are diluted by dense and redundant image tokens. Recent multimodal reasoning methods usually extend chain-of-thought from language models into visual or latent spaces, seeking to add intermediate reasoning states while overlooking the negative impact of redundant visual tokens. We propose LatEnt Noise maSk (Lens), a question-conditioned visual evidence purification framework that empowers MLLMs to reason with cleaner visual cues in latent space. Lens introduces a lightweight Lens Evidence Token (LET) to score which visual tokens support the current question and preserve them during decoding. Guided by the LET scores, it injects adaptive latent noise into low-relevance tokens, softly suppressing distractors without changing the model backbone or token sequence. With only one temporary learnable control token and a lightweight noise generator, Lens adds minimal overhead while improving the base MLLM by 2.4-6.4 points on most VQA datasets and by 4.1-6.4 points on grounding tasks. These results show that multimodal reasoning can benefit more directly from cleaner question-relevant visual evidence than from simply extending the reasoning trace.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) improve generalization and interpretability in autonomous driving but suffer from efficiency issues due to long visual token sequences, particularly in standard multi-view settings. Existing token pruning methods employ fixed pruning rate allocation and static importance metrics, ignoring dynamic inter-view importance differences and the evolving information importance during inference. Our analysis reveals that multi-view VLMs inherently encode task-related view priors in deeper layers and exhibit dynamic information requirements. Motivated by these findings, we propose MVPruner, a two-stage adaptive token pruning method that aligns pruning behavior with the model's dynamic information requirements. The first stage allocates pruning budgets based on the information diversity of each view, and retains tokens with consistent contribution across stages, ensuring semantic representational capacity. The second stage allocates budgets and selects tokens guided by instruction text to guarantee task alignment. Experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method. For example, DriveMM equipped with MVPruner achieves 87.3% reduction in FLOPs, 4.97* speedup in prefilling phase while retaining 98.5% accuracy on DriveLM benchmark.
Reducing visual token redundancy is critical for accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) without degrading cross-modal reasoning performance. Existing token pruning methods typically rely on single-layer signals, such as attention scores or token similarities, which overlook the cross-layer transformation of visual representations and may exhibit positional bias in multimodal token sequences. To address this limitation, we propose a training-free token pruning framework based on Cross-Layer Spectral Evolution (CLSE). Instead of measuring token importance from single-layer feature magnitudes, CLSE quantifies how token representations evolve across Transformer layers in the frequency domain. This evolution reflects the transition from high-frequency structural details to low-frequency semantic abstractions. We observe that tokens with stronger spectral redistribution across layers are more likely to be semantically active and should therefore be preserved. By modeling cross-layer token dynamics, CLSE provides a stable importance criterion that mitigates positional bias. Extensive experiments on both image and video benchmarks demonstrate that CLSE achieves a superior trade-off between efficiency and accuracy under aggressive token reduction. Across multiple MLLMs, CLSE reduces FLOPs, KV cache memory, and latency while maintaining competitive or improved performance.
Despite their remarkable performance, Vision Language Models (VLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens. While diversity maximization has become a dominant strategy for token reduction, existing methods rely on cosine-based normalized similarity that discards magnitude information, failing to faithfully approximate the original feature representation and leading to suboptimal performance, particularly on compositional multi-skill reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce SPARE, a subspace reconstruction method that reformulates token pruning as a column subset selection problem and explicitly minimizes reconstruction error. By iteratively selecting tokens with large projection residuals, SPARE performs reconstruction-driven pruning beyond angular diversity. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive anti-relevance phenomenon: tokens with lower image-text relevance score can better preserve contextual information. Based on this finding, we incorporate anti-relevance into SPARE as an additional selection criterion to promote context-aware token selection. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SPARE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong gains on compositional tasks. When applied to LLaVA, SPARE removes up to 94% of visual tokens while retaining 95% of the baseline performance, all in a fully training-free manner.
Audio-visual captioning generates natural language descriptions from video and audio content. Multimodal LLMs have advanced this task, but both modalities contribute many tokens to the LLM input, where prefill self-attention scales quadratically. Existing token-pruning methods usually retain tokens by attention, saliency, or cross-entropy loss, yet the hard threshold selection makes it difficult to retain tokens that are truly valuable, especially for high-confusing tokens near the decision boundary. To this end, we propose a AVEX-Prune, an RL-based audio-visual dynamic token pruning method in this work. In our AVEX-Prune, an audio-visual token exchange strategy is proposed to select truly valuable tokens by replacing low-confidence retained tokens with high-confidence candidate tokens from the same or the other modality, and measuring the differences in caption generation from token swaps. AVEX-Prune preserves full-token quality at a 40% retention ratio on both VILA 1.5-8B (54.5 vs. 54.6) and VideoLLaMA 2 (57.0 vs. 56.8).