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Main Authors: Zhang, Weichen, Zhu, Zhui, Li, Ningbo, Tao, Shilong, Liu, Kebin, Liu, Yunhao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06084
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author Zhang, Weichen
Zhu, Zhui
Li, Ningbo
Tao, Shilong
Liu, Kebin
Liu, Yunhao
author_facet Zhang, Weichen
Zhu, Zhui
Li, Ningbo
Tao, Shilong
Liu, Kebin
Liu, Yunhao
contents Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance on multimodal reasoning tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning and so on, but their inference cost remains a significant challenge due to the large number of vision tokens processed during the prefill stage. Existing pruning methods often rely on directly using the attention patterns or static text prompt guidance, failing to exploit the dynamic internal signals generated during inference. To address these issues, we propose AdaptInfer, a plug-and-play framework for adaptive vision token pruning in VLMs. First, we introduce a fine-grained, dynamic text-guided pruning mechanism that reuses layer-wise text-to-text attention maps to construct soft priors over text-token importance, allowing more informed scoring of vision tokens at each stage. Second, we perform an offline analysis of cross-modal attention shifts and identify consistent inflection locations in inference, which inspire us to propose a more principled and efficient pruning schedule. Our method is lightweight and plug-and-play, also generalizable across multi-modal tasks. Experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method. For example, it reduces CUDA latency by 61.3% while maintaining an average accuracy of 93.1% on vanilla LLaVA-1.5-7B. Under the same token budget, AdaptInfer surpasses SOTA in accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_06084
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AdaptInfer: Adaptive Token Pruning for Vision-Language Model Inference with Dynamical Text Guidance
Zhang, Weichen
Zhu, Zhui
Li, Ningbo
Tao, Shilong
Liu, Kebin
Liu, Yunhao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance on multimodal reasoning tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning and so on, but their inference cost remains a significant challenge due to the large number of vision tokens processed during the prefill stage. Existing pruning methods often rely on directly using the attention patterns or static text prompt guidance, failing to exploit the dynamic internal signals generated during inference. To address these issues, we propose AdaptInfer, a plug-and-play framework for adaptive vision token pruning in VLMs. First, we introduce a fine-grained, dynamic text-guided pruning mechanism that reuses layer-wise text-to-text attention maps to construct soft priors over text-token importance, allowing more informed scoring of vision tokens at each stage. Second, we perform an offline analysis of cross-modal attention shifts and identify consistent inflection locations in inference, which inspire us to propose a more principled and efficient pruning schedule. Our method is lightweight and plug-and-play, also generalizable across multi-modal tasks. Experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method. For example, it reduces CUDA latency by 61.3% while maintaining an average accuracy of 93.1% on vanilla LLaVA-1.5-7B. Under the same token budget, AdaptInfer surpasses SOTA in accuracy.
title AdaptInfer: Adaptive Token Pruning for Vision-Language Model Inference with Dynamical Text Guidance
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06084