Not All Redundant Tokens Are Alike: Analyzing Visual Token Pruning through Token Roles
Vision-language models (VLMs) process an image as a sequence of visual tokens, which creates a substantial computational bottleneck during inference. Recent visual token pruning methods address this issue by removing seemingly redundant tokens, yet it remains unclear how these pruning decisions relate to the functional roles of visual tokens. In this work, we analyze visual token pruning through the lens of token roles identified by EmbedLens. We first show that representative pruning methods exhibit distinct token-role biases, but these biases do not directly correlate with downstream performance. To better understand this behavior, we refine the token-role assignment procedure and evalu...
| Authors | Hyeonyu Kim, Sehwan Lim, Youngwon Choi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 5 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 August 2026 |
Popularity, last 2 days
0 now. Counts as reported by the source, snapshotted daily by Silytics.
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 18 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.