SparseVLM: Visual Token Sparsification for Efficient Vision-Language Model Inference

Yuan Zhang; Chun-Kai Fan; Junpeng Ma; Wenzhao Zheng; Tao Huang; Kuan Cheng; Denis Gudovskiy; Tomoyuki Okuno; Yohei Nakata; Kurt Keutzer; Shanghang Zhang

arXiv · 2410.04417

SparseVLM: Visual Token Sparsification for Efficient Vision-Language Model Inference

Yuan Zhang·Chun-Kai Fan·Junpeng Ma·Wenzhao Zheng·Tao Huang·Kuan Cheng·Denis Gudovskiy·Tomoyuki Okuno·Yohei Nakata·Kurt Keutzer·Shanghang Zhang

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Abstract

In vision-language models (VLMs), visual tokens usually bear a significant amount of computational overhead despite sparsity of information in them when compared to text tokens. To address this, most existing methods learn a network to prune redundant visual tokens using certain training data. Differently, we propose a text-guided training-free token optimization mechanism dubbed SparseVLM that eliminates the need of extra parameters or fine-tuning costs. Given that visual tokens complement text tokens in VLM's linguistic reasoning, we select relevant text tokens to rate the significance of visual tokens using self-attention matrices and, then, prune visual tokens using the proposed strategy to maximize sparsity while retaining information. In particular, we introduce a rank-based strategy to adaptively determine the sparsification ratio for each layer, alongside a token recycling method that compresses pruned tokens into more compact representations. Experimental results show that SparseVLM increases the efficiency of various VLMs in a number of image and video understanding tasks. For example, LLaVA when equipped with SparseVLM achieves 54% reduction in FLOPs, 37% decrease in CUDA latency while maintaining 97% of its original accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/Gumpest/SparseVLMs.

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BibTeX RIS

Yuan Zhang, Chun-Kai Fan, Junpeng Ma, Wenzhao Zheng, Tao Huang, Kuan Cheng, Denis Gudovskiy, Tomoyuki Okuno, Yohei Nakata, Kurt Keutzer, Shanghang Zhang. 2025-06-03. SparseVLM: Visual Token Sparsification for Efficient Vision-Language Model Inference. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04417

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