When Large Vision-Language Model Meets Large Remote Sensing Imagery: Coarse-to-Fine Text-Guided Token Pruning
This work addresses the problem of computational inefficiency and information loss in LVLMs for gigapixel remote sensing imagery, offering a domain-specific solution.
The paper tackles the challenge of efficiently processing large Remote Sensing Images (RSIs) with Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) by proposing a text-guided token pruning method with Dynamic Image Pyramid integration, which outperforms existing high-resolution strategies on four datasets and shows higher efficiency under high-resolution settings.
Efficient vision-language understanding of large Remote Sensing Images (RSIs) is meaningful but challenging. Current Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically employ limited pre-defined grids to process images, leading to information loss when handling gigapixel RSIs. Conversely, using unlimited grids significantly increases computational costs. To preserve image details while reducing computational complexity, we propose a text-guided token pruning method with Dynamic Image Pyramid (DIP) integration. Our method introduces: (i) a Region Focus Module (RFM) that leverages text-aware region localization capability to identify critical vision tokens, and (ii) a coarse-to-fine image tile selection and vision token pruning strategy based on DIP, which is guided by RFM outputs and avoids directly processing the entire large imagery. Additionally, existing benchmarks for evaluating LVLMs' perception ability on large RSI suffer from limited question diversity and constrained image sizes. We construct a new benchmark named LRS-VQA, which contains 7,333 QA pairs across 8 categories, with image length up to 27,328 pixels. Our method outperforms existing high-resolution strategies on four datasets using the same data. Moreover, compared to existing token reduction methods, our approach demonstrates higher efficiency under high-resolution settings. Dataset and code are in https://github.com/VisionXLab/LRS-VQA.