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Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models: Are We Solving the Right Problem?

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arxiv 2502.11501 v2 pith:JO4BRMWZ submitted 2025-02-17 cs.CL cs.CV

classification cs.CLcs.CV
keywords tokenpruninglanguagecostsdesignevaluationlargemethods
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable performance for cross-modal understanding and generation, yet still suffer from severe inference costs. Recently, abundant works have been proposed to solve this problem with token pruning, which identifies the redundant tokens in MLLMs and then prunes them to reduce the computation and KV storage costs, leading to significant acceleration without training. While these methods claim efficiency gains, critical questions about their fundamental design and evaluation remain unanswered: Why do many existing approaches underperform even compared to naive random token selection? Are attention-based scoring sufficient for reliably identifying redundant tokens? Is language information really helpful during token pruning? What makes a good trade-off between token importance and duplication? Are current evaluation protocols comprehensive and unbiased? The ignorance of previous research on these problems hinders the long-term development of token pruning. In this paper, we answer these questions one by one, providing insights into the design of future token pruning methods.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. ORCA: ORgan-Centroid Aggregation for Training-Free 3D CT Visual Token Compression

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    ORCA compresses 3D CT tokens into organ-guided connected regions with sinusoidal centroid encoding, outperforming grid average and other compressors at matched budgets.

  2. C-PTQ: Fisher-weighted Channel-wise Sensitivity for Post-training Quantization of MLLMs

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    C-PTQ weights quantization error by per-channel Fisher information of the task loss, improving low-bit accuracy of multimodal LLMs by small margins over existing channel-wise scaling methods.

  3. EgoPrune: Efficient Token Pruning for Egomotion Video Reasoning in Embodied Agent

    cs.CV 2025-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    EgoPrune prunes egomotion video tokens by homography-based frame alignment and MMR selection, keeping accuracy close to the full-token baseline while reducing compute.

  4. GreedyPrune: Retenting Critical Visual Token Set for Large Vision Language Models

    cs.CV 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A training-free token pruning method that combines cosine-similarity saliency with greedy redundancy removal to preserve accuracy at high compression ratios.

  5. Beyond Attention or Similarity: Maximizing Conditional Diversity for Token Pruning in MLLMs

    cs.CV 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    CDPruner prunes visual tokens in MLLMs by maximizing instruction-conditioned diversity via a determinantal point process, preserving accuracy at high reduction ratios.

  6. Towards General Continuous Memory for Vision-Language Models

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A vision-language model can act as its own continuous memory encoder, compressing external multimodal knowledge into eight embeddings that improve reasoning when prepended to the frozen model.

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