Lyu Mengsi
2026
TrimTokenator: Towards Adaptive Visual Token Pruning for Large Multimodal Models
Hao Zhang | Lyu Mengsi | Chenrui He | Yulong Ao | Yonghua Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Hao Zhang | Lyu Mengsi | Chenrui He | Yulong Ao | Yonghua Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved significant success across various tasks. These models usually encode visual inputs into dense token sequences, which are then concatenated with textual tokens and jointly processed by a language model. However, the increased token count substantially raises computational and memory costs during inference. Token pruning has emerged as a promising approach to address this issue. Existing token pruning methods often rely on costly calibration or suboptimal importance metrics, leading to redundant retained tokens. In this paper, we analyze the redundancy differences between visual and textual tokens and propose pruning exclusively on visual tokens. Based on this, we propose a visual token pruning strategy that explicitly preserves both cross-modal alignment and intra-modal informational diversity. We introduce a mutual information-based token pruning strategy that removes visual tokens semantically misaligned with textual tokens, effectively preserving the alignment between the visual and textual modalities. We further refine the retained tokens by maximizing their expected pairwise distances in the latent space to enhance representational quality and reduce redundancy. which is solved efficiently with a greedy algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method maintains strong performance while reducing tokens by 88.9% on models such as LLaVA-1.5-7B and LLaVA-NEXT-7B, resulting in a 56.7% improvement in inference speed.
PDTrim: Targeted Pruning for Prefill-Decode Disaggregation in Inference
Hao Zhang | Lyu Mengsi | Zhuo Chen | Yulong Ao | Yonghua Lin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Hao Zhang | Lyu Mengsi | Zhuo Chen | Yulong Ao | Yonghua Lin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities across various tasks, but their deployment is constrained by high computational and memory costs. Model pruning provides an effective means to alleviate these demands. However, existing methods often ignore the characteristics of prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation in practice. In this paper, we propose a pruning method that is highly integrated with PD disaggregation, enabling more precise pruning of blocks. Our approach constructs pruning and distillation sets to perform iterative block removal, obtaining better pruning solutions. Moreover, we analyze the pruning sensitivity of the prefill and decode stages and identify removable blocks specific to each stage, making it well suited for PD disaggregation deployment. Extensive experiments demonstrate our approach consistently achieves strong performance in both PD disaggregation and PD unified (non-PD disaggregation) settings, and can also be extended to other non-block pruning methods. Under the same settings, our method achieves improved performance and faster inference.