Balanced Token Pruning: Accelerating Vision Language Models Beyond Local OptimizationKaiyuan Li, Xiaoyue Chen, Chen Gao et al.
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown impressive performance across multi-modal tasks by encoding images into thousands of tokens. However, the large number of image tokens results in significant computational overhead, and the use of dynamic high-resolution inputs further increases this burden. Previous approaches have attempted to reduce the number of image tokens through token pruning, typically by selecting tokens based on attention scores or image token diversity. Through empirical studies, we observe that existing methods often overlook the joint impact of pruning on both the current layer's output (local) and the outputs of subsequent layers (global), leading to suboptimal pruning decisions. To address this challenge, we propose Balanced Token Pruning (BTP), a plug-and-play method for pruning vision tokens. Specifically, our method utilizes a small calibration set to divide the pruning process into multiple stages. In the early stages, our method emphasizes the impact of pruning on subsequent layers, whereas in the deeper stages, the focus shifts toward preserving the consistency of local outputs. Extensive experiments across various LVLMs demonstrate the broad effectiveness of our approach on multiple benchmarks. Our method achieves a 78% compression rate while preserving 96.7% of the original models' performance on average. Our code is available at https://github.com/EmbodiedCity/NeurIPS2025-Balanced-Token-Pruning.
11.8CVFeb 18, 2025
Understanding and Evaluating Hallucinations in 3D Visual Language ModelsRuiying Peng, Kaiyuan Li, Weichen Zhang et al.
Recently, 3D-LLMs, which combine point-cloud encoders with large models, have been proposed to tackle complex tasks in embodied intelligence and scene understanding. In addition to showing promising results on 3D tasks, we found that they are significantly affected by hallucinations. For instance, they may generate objects that do not exist in the scene or produce incorrect relationships between objects. To investigate this issue, this work presents the first systematic study of hallucinations in 3D-LLMs. We begin by quickly evaluating hallucinations in several representative 3D-LLMs and reveal that they are all significantly affected by hallucinations. We then define hallucinations in 3D scenes and, through a detailed analysis of datasets, uncover the underlying causes of these hallucinations. We find three main causes: (1) Uneven frequency distribution of objects in the dataset. (2) Strong correlations between objects. (3) Limited diversity in object attributes. Additionally, we propose new evaluation metrics for hallucinations, including Random Point Cloud Pair and Opposite Question Evaluations, to assess whether the model generates responses based on visual information and aligns it with the text's meaning.
10.2CVFeb 20, 2025
PLPHP: Per-Layer Per-Head Vision Token Pruning for Efficient Large Vision-Language ModelsYu Meng, Kaiyuan Li, Chenran Huang et al.
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of multimodal tasks. However, their inference efficiency is constrained by the large number of visual tokens processed during decoding. To address this challenge, we propose Per-Layer Per-Head Vision Token Pruning (PLPHP), a two-level fine-grained pruning method including Layer-Level Retention Rate Allocation and Head-Level Vision Token Pruning. Motivated by the Vision Token Re-attention phenomenon across decoder layers, we dynamically adjust token retention rates layer by layer. Layers that exhibit stronger attention to visual information preserve more vision tokens, while layers with lower vision attention are aggressively pruned. Furthermore, PLPHP applies pruning at the attention head level, enabling different heads within the same layer to independently retain critical context. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PLPHP delivers an 18% faster decoding speed and reduces the Key-Value Cache (KV Cache) size by over 50%, all at the cost of 0.46% average performance drop, while also achieving notable performance improvements in multi-image tasks. These results highlight the effectiveness of fine-grained token pruning and contribute to advancing the efficiency and scalability of LVLMs. Our source code will be made publicly available.