What Kind of Visual Tokens Do We Need? Training-free Visual Token Pruning for Multi-modal Large Language Models from the Perspective of Graph

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jiang, Yutao, Wu, Qiong, Lin, Wenhao, Yu, Wei, Zhou, Yiyi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Jiang, Yutao
Wu, Qiong
Lin, Wenhao
Yu, Wei
Zhou, Yiyi
author_facet Jiang, Yutao
Wu, Qiong
Lin, Wenhao
Yu, Wei
Zhou, Yiyi
contents Recent Multimodal Large Language Models(MLLMs) often use a large number of visual tokens to compensate their visual shortcoming, leading to excessive computation and obvious visual redundancy. In this paper, we investigate what kind of visual tokens are needed for MLLMs, and reveal that both foreground and background tokens are critical for MLLMs given the varying difficulties of examples. Based on this observation, we propose a graph-based method towards training-free visual token pruning, termed G-Prune.In particular, G-Prune regards visual tokens as nodes, and construct their connections based on their semantic similarities. Afterwards, the information flow is propagated via weighted links, and the most important tokens after iterations are kept for MLLMs, which can be front or background.To validate G-Prune, we apply it to a recent MLLM called LLaVA-NeXT, and conduct extensive experiments on a set of benchmarks.The experiment results show that G-Prune can greatly reduce computation overhead while retaining high performance on both coarse- and fine-grained tasks. For instance, G-Prune can reduce 63.57\% FLOPs of LLaVA-NeXT on VQA2.0 and TextVQA with only 0.95\% and 2.34\% accuracy drops, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_02268
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Kind of Visual Tokens Do We Need? Training-free Visual Token Pruning for Multi-modal Large Language Models from the Perspective of Graph
Jiang, Yutao
Wu, Qiong
Lin, Wenhao
Yu, Wei
Zhou, Yiyi
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Recent Multimodal Large Language Models(MLLMs) often use a large number of visual tokens to compensate their visual shortcoming, leading to excessive computation and obvious visual redundancy. In this paper, we investigate what kind of visual tokens are needed for MLLMs, and reveal that both foreground and background tokens are critical for MLLMs given the varying difficulties of examples. Based on this observation, we propose a graph-based method towards training-free visual token pruning, termed G-Prune.In particular, G-Prune regards visual tokens as nodes, and construct their connections based on their semantic similarities. Afterwards, the information flow is propagated via weighted links, and the most important tokens after iterations are kept for MLLMs, which can be front or background.To validate G-Prune, we apply it to a recent MLLM called LLaVA-NeXT, and conduct extensive experiments on a set of benchmarks.The experiment results show that G-Prune can greatly reduce computation overhead while retaining high performance on both coarse- and fine-grained tasks. For instance, G-Prune can reduce 63.57\% FLOPs of LLaVA-NeXT on VQA2.0 and TextVQA with only 0.95\% and 2.34\% accuracy drops, respectively.
title What Kind of Visual Tokens Do We Need? Training-free Visual Token Pruning for Multi-modal Large Language Models from the Perspective of Graph
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02268