QCPruner: Query-Conditioned Population Coverage for Visual Token Pruning

📅 2026-09-17
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
为减少多模态大语言模型的视觉标记计算负担,提出QCPruner方法,通过基于查询条件的双边效用加权来优化视觉覆盖,无需训练即可有效保留关键信息。
📝 Abstract
The high visual-token load in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) motivates training-free pruning to reduce later-layer computation, but under a fixed budget, pruning must preserve query-relevant evidence while avoiding redundancy. Existing methods rank tokens, diversify selected subsets, or optimize coverage without using a shared per-visual query utility to weight both visual targets and candidate representatives. We introduce QCPruner, which makes both roles query-conditioned through bilateral utility weighting. Using keyword-matched query anchors, QCPruner fuses two cross-modal cues into utility and applies it to both visual targets and candidate representatives within visual-affinity-based coverage. The resulting nonnegative facility-location objective is monotone and submodular, retains the standard (1-1/e) greedy guarantee, and requires no model training or parameter updates. Across LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, LLaVA-Video, and Qwen2.5-VL, QCPruner achieves the highest average relative performance among evaluated complete-system pruning methods at every reported token budget. At 32 of 576 tokens on LLaVA-1.5-7B, it retains 96.1% of unpruned performance, versus 93.9% for the strongest evaluated baseline. At 256 of 1296 tokens on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, the corresponding values are 96.7% and 92.5%.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

multimodal large language models
visual tokens
pruning
query-relevant evidence
redundancy
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Query-Conditioned
Bilateral Utility Weighting
Visual-Affinity-Based Coverage
Nonnegative Facility-Location Objective
Training-Free Pruning
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