GOTS: Greedy Orthogonal Token Selection for High-Resolution Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance in multimodal understanding, yet remain challenging to deploy on resource-constrained edge devices due to the substantial computational overhead of processing numerous visual tokens. Token reduction is a promising direction for accelerating VLMs inference, but existing approaches either rely on attention maps that are incompatible with modern acceleration frameworks or depend on computationally intensive pairwise similarity comparisons, which undermine scalability and negate their practical benefits in deployment. In this paper, we propose an attention-free and lightweight token reduction framework as a plug-and-play module for VLMs, which preserves both important and diverse tokens to produce a compact visual representation. First, to enable attention-free importance estimation, we adopt an information-theoretic perspective and quantify token information using a novel entropy-based criterion, retaining those with more expressive and less degenerate feature representations. Second, to ensure diverse visual coverage in a lightweight manner, we introduce a transformation-induced consistency signal where similar tokens yield similar signals, such that sorting by this signal places similar tokens close to each other and enables stride-based selection to produce a diverse token set. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off, maintaining competitive performance under aggressive compression.

Vision-language models (VLMs) rely on long visual token sequences for visual understanding, making the prefill stage expensive in both computation and memory. Most existing pruning methods follow an absolute-ranking paradigm, assigning importance scores to visual tokens and retaining a fixed top-K subset. In this work, we argue that this paradigm is fundamentally brittle: attention sinks distort token importance rankings, while image redundancy and query-dependent visual evidence make fixed token budgets unreliable across inputs. We propose OccamToken, a training-free framework that replaces absolute token ranking with register-anchored relative evidence testing. Instead of asking which tokens are globally important, OccamToken evaluates whether a visual token provides information beyond a register-based reference. Our key insight is that register tokens naturally absorb low-information attention patterns, making them a stable reference for identifying genuinely informative visual evidence. Based on this principle, OccamToken performs both image-adaptive redundancy pruning and query-adaptive relevance pruning through dynamic thresholds derived from register attention. Across LLaVA-NeXT, LLaVA-v1.5, and Qwen3-VL, OccamToken consistently improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off without additional training. Notably, on LLaVA-NeXT, it reduces 2,880 visual tokens to approximately 40 while preserving over 93% of the original accuracy, enabling stable visual token compression even in the extreme 1.4% retention regime.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across different tasks, but their computational cost is dominated by the large number of visual tokens fed to the language model. Existing token reduction methods rely on attention-based scores or pairwise similarity, without an explicit semantic representation of each token. We introduce TORINO (TOken Reduction via Interpretable coNcept Overlap), a plug-and-play framework for adaptive visual token reduction in VLMs that requires no fine-tuning of the underlying model. TORINO leverages Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to project visual tokens into an interpretable latent space where token relationships can be analyzed through shared concept activations. Specifically, we define concept overlap as the degree of agreement between active SAE latents and use it to group tokens that share semantic content. Reduction within each group is then performed by either pruning or merging, providing a unified framework that preserves semantically important visual information while removing redundancy. Unlike fixed-budget approaches, TORINO dynamically adapts the reduction rate to input complexity, allowing different images to retain different numbers of tokens. Experiments across multiple vision-language benchmarks show that TORINO achieves favorable efficiency-accuracy trade-offs, reducing the number of visual tokens with minimal performance loss.