When Vision Becomes Text: Visual Token Pruning via Cross-Modal Residual Guidance in VLMs
Abundant visual information strengthens vision-language model (VLM) perception, yet massive visual tokens raise inference costs. Existing visual token pruning methods rely on similarity-based guidance, which exploits pairwise text-vision and vision-vision token correlations for compression. However, such methods only capture local layer-level signals and overlook the whole inference process in VLM. In this paper, we revisit VLM inference and present a new efficient guidance scheme that complements similarity-based guidance. In particular, we identify a key observation: as LLM layers deepen, text tokens continuously aggregate visual information via self-attention and progressively absorb p...
| Authors | Congyang Ou, Ruike Song, Yang Zhou et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 11 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 August 2026 |
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