Frequency-Aware Token Reduction for Efficient Vision Transformer

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Dong-Jae, Hur, Jiwan, Choi, Jaehyun, Yu, Jaemyung, Kim, Junmo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lee, Dong-Jae
Hur, Jiwan
Choi, Jaehyun
Yu, Jaemyung
Kim, Junmo
author_facet Lee, Dong-Jae
Hur, Jiwan
Choi, Jaehyun
Yu, Jaemyung
Kim, Junmo
contents Vision Transformers have demonstrated exceptional performance across various computer vision tasks, yet their quadratic computational complexity concerning token length remains a significant challenge. To address this, token reduction methods have been widely explored. However, existing approaches often overlook the frequency characteristics of self-attention, such as rank collapsing and over-smoothing phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a frequency-aware token reduction strategy that improves computational efficiency while preserving performance by mitigating rank collapsing. Our method partitions tokens into high-frequency tokens and low-frequency tokens. high-frequency tokens are selectively preserved, while low-frequency tokens are aggregated into a compact direct current token to retain essential low-frequency components. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves accuracy while reducing computational overhead and mitigating rank collapsing and over smoothing. Furthermore, we analyze the previous methods, shedding light on their implicit frequency characteristics and limitations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_21477
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Frequency-Aware Token Reduction for Efficient Vision Transformer
Lee, Dong-Jae
Hur, Jiwan
Choi, Jaehyun
Yu, Jaemyung
Kim, Junmo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Vision Transformers have demonstrated exceptional performance across various computer vision tasks, yet their quadratic computational complexity concerning token length remains a significant challenge. To address this, token reduction methods have been widely explored. However, existing approaches often overlook the frequency characteristics of self-attention, such as rank collapsing and over-smoothing phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a frequency-aware token reduction strategy that improves computational efficiency while preserving performance by mitigating rank collapsing. Our method partitions tokens into high-frequency tokens and low-frequency tokens. high-frequency tokens are selectively preserved, while low-frequency tokens are aggregated into a compact direct current token to retain essential low-frequency components. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves accuracy while reducing computational overhead and mitigating rank collapsing and over smoothing. Furthermore, we analyze the previous methods, shedding light on their implicit frequency characteristics and limitations.
title Frequency-Aware Token Reduction for Efficient Vision Transformer
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21477