Short-LVLM: Compressing and Accelerating Large Vision-Language Models by Pruning Redundant Layers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ma, Ji, Suo, Wei, Wang, Peng, Zhang, Yanning
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ma, Ji
Suo, Wei
Wang, Peng
Zhang, Yanning
author_facet Ma, Ji
Suo, Wei
Wang, Peng
Zhang, Yanning
contents Although large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multi-modal understanding and reasoning, their practical applications are still limited by massive model parameters and high computational costs. Recent efforts from natural language processing (NLP) have shown the effectiveness of layer pruning, offering a plausible training-free compression solution. However, due to the modality divergence between vision and language, it is unclear whether these NLP techniques are still effective in LVLMs. In this paper, we empirically prove that directly applying these layer pruning methods to LVLMs is ineffective. Through extensive experiments, we find that non-essential vision-language (VL) tokens and inter-layer feature gaps pose critical challenges to pruning layers in LVLMs. Based on these insights, we propose a novel framework Short-LVLM (SVL) that can utilize important VL tokens and mitigate the layer-wise feature gaps. Notably, Short-LVLM not only achieves a superior trade-off between performance and efficiency but also exhibits several potential advantages, i.e., training-free, model-agnostic, and highly compatible. The code for this work is publicly available at https://github.com/ASGO-MM/Short-LVLM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_23362
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Short-LVLM: Compressing and Accelerating Large Vision-Language Models by Pruning Redundant Layers
Ma, Ji
Suo, Wei
Wang, Peng
Zhang, Yanning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Although large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multi-modal understanding and reasoning, their practical applications are still limited by massive model parameters and high computational costs. Recent efforts from natural language processing (NLP) have shown the effectiveness of layer pruning, offering a plausible training-free compression solution. However, due to the modality divergence between vision and language, it is unclear whether these NLP techniques are still effective in LVLMs. In this paper, we empirically prove that directly applying these layer pruning methods to LVLMs is ineffective. Through extensive experiments, we find that non-essential vision-language (VL) tokens and inter-layer feature gaps pose critical challenges to pruning layers in LVLMs. Based on these insights, we propose a novel framework Short-LVLM (SVL) that can utilize important VL tokens and mitigate the layer-wise feature gaps. Notably, Short-LVLM not only achieves a superior trade-off between performance and efficiency but also exhibits several potential advantages, i.e., training-free, model-agnostic, and highly compatible. The code for this work is publicly available at https://github.com/ASGO-MM/Short-LVLM.
title Short-LVLM: Compressing and Accelerating Large Vision-Language Models by Pruning Redundant Layers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23362