Pyramid Token Pruning for High-Resolution Large Vision-Language Models via Region, Token, and Instruction-Guided Importance

Authors:
  • YLYuxuan Liang
    Yuxuan Liang
  • XLXu Li
    Xu Li
  • XCXiaolei Chen
    Xiaolei Chen
  • YZYi Zheng
    Yi Zheng
  • HCHaotian Chen
    Haotian Chen
  • BLBin Li
    Bin Li
  • XXXiangyang Xue
    Xiangyang Xue

Abstract
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently demonstrated strong multimodal understanding, yet their fine-grained visual perception is often constrained by low input resolutions. A common remedy is to partition high-resolution images into multiple sub-images for separate encoding, but this approach drastically inflates the number of visual tokens and introduces prohibitive inference overhead. To overcome this challenge, we propose Pyramid Token Pruning (PTP), a training-free strategy that hierarchically integrates bottom-up visual saliency at both region and token levels with top-down instruction-guided relevance. Inspired by human visual cognition, PTP selectively preserves more tokens from salient regions while further emphasizing those most relevant to task instructions. Extensive experiments on 13 diverse benchmarks show that PTP substantially reduces computational cost, memory usage, and inference latency, with negligible performance degradation.