Variation-aware Vision Token Dropping for Faster Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract: Large vision-LLMs (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding tasks. However, the increasing demand for high-resolution image and long-video understanding results in substantial token counts, leading to reduced inference efficiency. Token compression offers a direct solution by reducing the number of tokens to be processed, thereby improving computational efficiency. Through extensive analysis, we identify two critical limitations in existing inner-LLM token compression methods: positional bias and incompatibility with efficient operators, which hinder their practical deployment for LVLM acceleration. This paper presents the first approach from a token variation perspective, revealing that visual token variations within LLMs exhibit task-agnostic properties. We propose Variation-aware Vision Token Dropping (\textit{i.e.}, \textbf{V$^2$Drop}), which progressively removes visual tokens with minimal variation during LVLM inference, thereby enhancing computational efficiency. Extensive experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that our V$^2$Drop is able to maintain \textbf{94.0\%} and \textbf{98.6\%} of the original model performance for image and video understanding tasks respectively, while reducing LLM generation latency by \textbf{31.5\%} and \textbf{74.2\%}. When combined with efficient operators, V$^2$Drop further reduces GPU peak memory usage.