DIVE (Dynamic Iterative Visual Evidence Construction), a training-free framework that recasts visual-token pruning as dynamic evidence construction and builds a retained set of complementary, prompt-relevant evidence.
Abstract
Visual inputs in vision-language models (VLMs) are often encoded into substantially longer token sequences than text, making visual tokens a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Abundant recent methods address this bottleneck by scoring token importance and pruning low-scoring tokens in a single pass. However, one-shot scoring is insufficient because a token's prompt-relevant usefulness depends on the evidence already retained. Motivated by this insight, we introduce DIVE (Dynamic Iterative Visual Evidence Construction), a training-free framework that recasts visual-token pruning as dynamic evidence construction. DIVE repeatedly selects the remaining token with the highest residual-conditioned score, updates the visual and prompt residuals to discount the evidence already explained, and re-evaluates the remaining tokens. This select-update-re-evaluate process builds a retained set of complementary, prompt-relevant evidence. Experiments across eight image-understanding benchmarks show that DIVE consistently preserves performance across token budgets. With an 88.9% reduction in visual tokens, DIVE retains 98.2% of the uncompressed model's average performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Zhong-Chenchen/DIVE.git.
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve strong multimodal understanding, but the hundreds to thousands of visual tokens they process impose substantial computational overhead, motivating training-free visual token pruning. In this work, we conduct two complementary analyses of visual token pruning. First, we measure the feature-space coverage of tokens retained before cross-modal fusion and find that aggressive pruning discards substantial visual information. Second, we track text-to-visual attention across decoder layers and find that the visual tokens considered important change substantially with depth, making one-shot pruning decisions unreliable. Together, these findings show that effective pruning should preserve broad visual coverage before fusion and progressively refine the retained tokens as cross-modal evidence evolves during fusion. We therefore propose STAR-Pro (STage-Wise Adaptive Token Reduction with Progressive Refinement), a training-free two-stage framework. Its Adaptive Stage applies pivoted QR to construct an over-budget feature-coverage candidate pool, while its Progressive Stage uses evolving text-to-visual attention at selected decoder layers to prune a nested survivor set under a target layer-average token budget. Extensive experiments across seven LVLMs spanning multiple architectures and 18 image and video benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of STAR-Pro under aggressive pruning. On LLaVA-Video-7B, STAR-Pro reduces visual tokens by 90.5%, retains 92.7% of baseline performance, and achieves a $2.24\times$ measured inference speedup. Code is available at https://github.com/EasonAI-5589/starpro.
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