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Stop Looking for Important Tokens in Multimodal Language Models: Duplication Matters More

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arxiv 2502.11494 v2 pith:7MRRGVCH submitted 2025-02-17 cs.CL cs.CV

classification cs.CLcs.CV
keywords tokensdarttokenduplicationleadingpruningvisionattention
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

Vision tokens in multimodal large language models often dominate huge computational overhead due to their excessive length compared to linguistic modality. Abundant recent methods aim to solve this problem with token pruning, which first defines an importance criterion for tokens and then prunes the unimportant vision tokens during inference. However, in this paper, we show that the importance is not an ideal indicator to decide whether a token should be pruned. Surprisingly, it usually results in inferior performance than random token pruning and leading to incompatibility to efficient attention computation operators.Instead, we propose DART (Duplication-Aware Reduction of Tokens), which prunes tokens based on its duplication with other tokens, leading to significant and training-free acceleration. Concretely, DART selects a small subset of pivot tokens and then retains the tokens with low duplication to the pivots, ensuring minimal information loss during token pruning. Experiments demonstrate that DART can prune 88.9% vision tokens while maintaining comparable performance, leading to a 1.99$\times$ and 2.99$\times$ speed-up in total time and prefilling stage, respectively, with good compatibility to efficient attention operators. Our codes are available at https://github.com/ZichenWen1/DART.

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Forward citations

Cited by 12 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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    SFPruner performs redundancy-aware visual token pruning in a single non-iterative pass using semantics-guided ridge leverage scores and directional masking, cutting selection latency from 112.4 ms to 2.5 ms at 512 tok...

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    A training-free, text-driven pre-LLM pruning method that keeps ~99% of LVLM performance while retaining only ~11-22% of visual tokens.

  4. Spectral Heat Flow for Conservative Token Condensation in Vision-Language Models

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Training-free SpecFlow condenses VLM visual tokens via kNN heat diffusion, adaptive quadtree budgets, and coreset sinks, retaining 95.6% LLaVA-1.5 performance after pruning 88.9% of tokens.

  5. ViCA: Efficient Multimodal LLMs with Vision-Only Cross-Attention

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    Frozen visual tokens with sparse cross-attention at selected layers preserve 98% accuracy while reducing vision-side FLOPs to 4% in LLaVA-1.5 models.

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