Spectral Evolution-Guided Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models
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.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
EntropyPrune: Matrix Entropy Guided Visual Token Pruning for Multimodal Large Language Models
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) incur substantial inference cost due to the processing of hundreds of visual tokens per image. Although token pruning has proven effective for accelerating inference, determining …
MADTP: Multimodal Alignment-Guided Dynamic Token Pruning for Accelerating Vision-Language Transformer
Vision-Language Transformers (VLTs) have shown great success recently, but are meanwhile accompanied by heavy computation costs, where a major reason can be attributed to the large number of visual and language tokens. E…
Recoverable Compression: A Multimodal Vision Token Recovery Mechanism Guided by Text Information
With the advancement of large-scale language modeling techniques, large multimodal models combining visual encoders with large language models have demonstrated exceptional performance in various visual tasks. Most of th…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelSTAR: Stage-Wise Attention-Guided Token Reduction for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models Inference
Although large vision-language models (LVLMs) leverage rich visual token representations to achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks, these tokens also introduce significant computational overhead during inference.…
Token ReductionUTPTrack: Towards Simple and Unified Token Pruning for Visual Tracking
One-stream Transformer-based trackers achieve advanced performance in visual object tracking but suffer from significant computational overhead that hinders real-time deployment. While token pruning offers a path to effi…
Visual Object TrackingVisual Tracking