InternVL-X: Advancing and Accelerating InternVL Series with Efficient Visual Token Compression

Abstract: Most multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) treat visual tokens as "a sequence of text", integrating them with text tokens into a LLM. However, a great quantity of visual tokens significantly increases the demand for computational resources and time. In this paper, we propose InternVL-X, which outperforms the InternVL model in both performance and efficiency by incorporating three visual token compression methods. First, we propose a novel vision-language projector, PVTC. This component integrates adjacent visual embeddings to form a local query and utilizes the transformed CLS token as a global query, then performs point-to-region cross-attention through these local and global queries to more effectively convert visual features. Second, we present a layer-wise visual token compression module, LVTC, which compresses tokens in the LLM shallow layers and then expands them through upsampling and residual connections in the deeper layers. This significantly enhances the model computational efficiency. Futhermore, we propose an efficient high resolution slicing method, RVTC, which dynamically adjusts the number of visual tokens based on image area or length filtering. RVTC greatly enhances training efficiency with only a slight reduction in performance. By utilizing 20% or fewer visual tokens, InternVL-X achieves state-of-the-art performance on 7 public MLLM benchmarks, and improves the average metric by 2.34% across 12 tasks.