TopV: Compatible Token Pruning with Inference Time Optimization for Fast and Low-Memory Multimodal Vision Language Model

Cheng Yang, Yang Sui, Jinqi Xiao, Lingyi Huang, Yu Gong, Chendi Li, Jinghua Yan, Yu Bai, Ponnuswamy Sadayappan, Xia Hu, Bo Yuan; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 19803-19813

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demand substantial computational resources during inference, largely due to the extensive visual input tokens for representing visual information. Previous studies have noted that visual tokens tend to receive less attention than text tokens, suggesting their lower importance during inference and potential for pruning. However, their methods encounter several chal- lenges: reliance on greedy heuristic criteria for token im- portance and incompatibility with FlashAttention and KV cache. To address these issues, we introduce TopV, a com- patible TOken Pruning with inference Time Optimization for fast and low-memory VLM, achieving efficient pruning without additional training or fine-tuning. Instead of re- lying on attention scores, we formulate token pruning as an optimization problem, accurately identifying important visual tokens while remaining compatible with FlashAtten- tion. Additionally, since we only perform this pruning once during the prefilling stage, it effectively reduces KV cache size. Our optimization framework incorporates a visual- aware cost function considering factors such as Feature Similarity, Relative Spatial Distance, and Absolute Central Distance, to measure the importance of each source visual token, enabling effective pruning of low-importance tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous token pruning methods, validating the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.