Challenge: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) excel at visual understanding but face severe computational bottlenecks when processing high-resolution images and long videos due to massive visual token counts.
Approach: They propose a taxonomy categorizing methods into vision-side, LLM-side and hybrid paradigms and analyze token selection mechanisms and pruning strategy.
Outcome: The proposed method selectively removes less informative tokens while maintaining performance.

Similar Papers

Semantically Comprehensive Token Pruning in LVLMs via Maximizing Concept Coverage (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing visual token pruning methods leverage simple metrics derived from human experience, such as attention or similarity, to rank and select tokens within a highly entangled feature space.
Approach: They propose a novel visual token pruning method that uses a concept-driven paradigm to quantify the Marginal Semantic Gain of each token's contribution to uncovered concepts.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in a concept-driven model while maintaining semantic completeness.
TrimTokenator: Towards Adaptive Visual Token Pruning for Large Multimodal Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing token pruning methods rely on costly calibration or suboptimal importance metrics, leading to redundant retained tokens.
Approach: They propose a token pruning strategy that preserves cross-modal alignment and informational diversity.
Outcome: The proposed method maintains strong performance while reducing tokens by 88.9% on two models.
LVPruning: An Effective yet Simple Language-Guided Vision Token Pruning Approach for Multi-modal Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) incur significant computational overhead due to the large number of vision tokens processed, limiting their practicality in resource-constrained environments.
Approach: They propose a language-guided vision token pruning method that can be integrated into existing MLLMs with minimal architectural changes.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces vision tokens by 90% and preserves model performance.
Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models: Are We Solving the Right Problem? (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Multimodal large language models have shown remarkable performance for cross-modal understanding and generation, yet suffer from severe inference costs.
Approach: They propose to prune redundant tokens in MLLMs to reduce computation and storage costs.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the computational and storage costs of MLLMs by identifying redundant tokens and pruning them.
CoViPAL: Layer-wise Contextualized Visual Token Pruning for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to prune redundant vision tokens struggle in shallow layers due to the lack of contextual information.
Approach: They propose a layer-wise contextualized visual token pruning method that uses a plug-and-play Pruning Module to prune redundant vision tokens.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms training-free pruning methods under equal token budgets and surpasses training based methods with comparable supervision.
PruneVid: Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Video Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to video token pruning face significant computational challenges due to the redundancy inherent in video data.
Approach: They propose a training-free visual token pruning method that reduces the redundancy inherent in video data and leverages LLMs’ inherent ability to selectively prune visual tokens irrelevant to specific queries.
Outcome: The proposed method can prune over 80% of tokens while maintaining competitive performance when combined with different video LLMs.
VisPCO: Visual Token Pruning Configuration Optimization via Budget-Aware Pareto-Frontier Learning for Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for visual token pruning rely on predefined configurations without determining whether they achieve optimal performance.
Approach: They propose a framework that formulates visual token pruning as a Pareto configuration optimization problem to automatically identify optimal configurations.
Outcome: The proposed framework approximates the empirical Pareto frontier obtained through grid search and generalizes well across pruning methods and VLM architectures.
HiPrune: Hierarchical Attention for Efficient Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for visual token pruning lack insight into the intrinsic property of the vision encoder . et al., 2017: 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens.
Approach: They propose a model-agnostic token pruning method that trains without training . they propose 'HiPrune' method which prunes visual tokens according to their attention .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens . it reduces inference FLOPs by 58.7% and maintains 99.99% accuracy with 2/9 tokens.
Vista-LLM: Decoupled Query-Guided Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Long-Video Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Long-video understanding is bottlenecked by the high cost of processing massive visual tokens.
Approach: They propose a decoupled framework for query-guided visual token pruning . their method reduces visual tokens by 90% and accelerates inference by 98% .
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces visual tokens by 90% and accelerates inference while retaining over 98% of baseline performance on average.
RedundancyLens: Revealing and Exploiting Visual Token Processing Redundancy for Efficient Decoder-Only MLLMs (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current decoder-only architectures achieve higher performance but lower efficiency . cross-attention-based architectures skip visual token computations .
Approach: They propose a training-free framework for analyzing trained MLLMs to investigate redundancy . they propose 'probe-activated Dynamic FFN and Hollow Attention' algorithms for visual token reductions and a layer ranking algorithm for inference acceleration.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves comparable performance to or better than state-of-the-art methods while remaining compatible with them.

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