aiqbench analysis
This arXiv preprint proposes learnable, layer-by-layer visual token pruning for vision-language models, with a fixed per-layer budget intended to suit hardware. The headline claim of retaining 99.8% of LLaVA-v1.5's performance while pruning 77.8% of visual tokens is the authors' own result and still needs independent replication across benchmarks. Readers working on multimodal inference cost should watch whether the fixed-budget schedule holds up outside the reported models.
LearnPrunerV2: Learnable Progressive Token Pruning for Vision-Language Models
arXiv:2610.36986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal capabilities but suffer from prohibitive computational overhead due to the massive number of visual tokens. While token pruning is a promising solution, existing methods still suffer from two major drawbacks: 1) unreliable pruning criteria that fail to accurately localize task-specific regions due to inherent attention biases or query-agnostic designs, and 2) suboptimal pruning strategies that employ rigid, non-adaptive schedules, overlooking the dynamic evolution of token redundancy across different model depths. To address these challenges, we propose LearnPrunerV2, which extends the previous two-stage heuristic framework (LearnPruner) into a fully learnable architecture. Specifically, we integrate lightweight learnable modules into every layer of the VLM backbone, which estimate token importance by fusing intrinsic visual saliency with extrinsic query relevance captured via a shadow token. By uncovering a consistent staircase redundancy pattern across VLM layers, we further introduce Budget-Deterministic Pruning (BDP) to establish a hardware-friendly schedule with fixed per-layer budgets. Extensive experimental results across various benchmarks and VLMs demonstrate that LearnPrunerV2 consistently outperform previous state-of-the-art methods. Notably, LearnPrunerV2 preserves 99.8% of the original performance when pruning 77.8% of visual tokens on LLaVA-v1.5, achieving a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off.
Abstract:Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal capabilities but suffer from prohibitive computational overhead due to the massive number of visual tokens. While token pruning is a promising solution, existing methods still suffer from two major drawbacks: 1) unreliable pruning criteria that fail to accurately localize task-specific regions due to inherent attention biases or query-agnostic designs, and 2) suboptimal pruning strategies that employ rigid, non-adaptive schedules, overlooking the dynamic evolution of token redundancy across different model depths. To address these challenges, we propose LearnPrunerV2, which extends the previous two-stage heuristic framework (LearnPruner) into a fully learnable architecture. Specifically, we integrate lightweight learnable modules into every layer of the VLM backbone, which estimate token importance by fusing intrinsic visual saliency with extrinsic query relevance captured via a shadow token. By uncovering a consistent staircase redundancy pattern across VLM layers, we further introduce Budget-Deterministic Pruning (BDP) to establish a hardware-friendly schedule with fixed per-layer budgets. Extensive experimental results across various benchmarks and VLMs demonstrate that LearnPrunerV2 consistently outperform previous state-of-the-art methods. Notably, LearnPrunerV2 preserves 99.8% of the original performance when pruning 77.8% of visual tokens on LLaVA-v1.5, achieving a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2610.36986 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2610.36986v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.36986 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 290 words