Representation Dynamics Reveal Semantic Saliency and Similarity for Visual Token Pruning in MLLMs
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) incur high inference latency from long visual token sequences. Existing pruning methods commonly use attention maps or output features to estimate token importance or redundancy. Several recent approaches also exploit representation changes, but when and how these changes reflect foreground saliency and semantic consistency remain insufficiently understood. We analyze visual token representation dynamics across encoder depth and uncover two findings. First, the relationship between token update magnitudes and foreground saliency is layer-dependent: large token updates concentrate on foreground regions in two depth intervals, separated by several si...
| Authors | Weixuan Li, Zikun Zhou, Xinyi Zhuang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.