Rethinking Visual Token Compression for Video Large Language Models: A Simple Yet Strong Baseline

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) achieve strong performance in video understanding, but their excessive visual tokens bring substantial computational overhead. Existing training-free compression methods improve inference efficiency by reducing visual tokens, yet they often rely on local adjacent-frame similarity for temporal redundancy estimation or allocate token budgets mainly according to segment length. Such designs are sensitive to frame-level noise and fail to capture the non-uniform information distribution of real-world videos. To address these challenges, we propose InfoMerge, a training-free visual token compression method that improves token utilization through robust redundancy estimation and content-aware budget allocation. Specifically, we propose the Temporal Fingerprint Difference: a segment-level second-order temporal redundancy estimation strategy, which models the temporal similarity structure of tokens at the same spatial positions within each segment. We further introduce Content-Aware Budget Allocation (CABA), which dynamically allocates segment-level token budgets based on segment uniqueness and spectral-entropy-based representational richness. By reducing repeated preservation of redundant static regions and allocating more tokens to informative segments, InfoMerge makes better use of the limited token budget while maintaining strong performance. Extensive experiments show that InfoMerge achieves strong efficiency--accuracy trade-offs across multiple benchmarks and backbones, with more pronounced advantages under aggressive compression. On LLaVA-OneVision-7B, InfoMerge retains 98.8% of the original average performance while reducing 85% of visual tokens and achieving a 4.24-fold speedup in the prefill stage.

Video large language models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in video understanding tasks. However, their practical deployment is still hindered by the inefficiency introduced by processing massive amounts of visual tokens. Although recent approaches achieve extremely low token retention ratios while maintaining accuracy comparable to full-token baselines, most of them perform compression only at the late stage of prefilling, leaving the efficiency of the vision encoder unoptimized. In this paper, we first show that vision encoding contributes a large portion to the time-to-first-token (TTFT). Therefore, instead of compressing visual tokens only after the vision encoder, performing compression inside the encoder still leaves substantial room for exploration. Based on this insight, we propose EarlyTom, a training-free token compression framework that performs early-stage visual token compression inside the vision encoder, enabling significantly better TTFT reduction and higher throughput. In addition, we introduce a decoupled spatial token selection strategy that improves the overall compression effectiveness. EarlyTom reduces TTFT by up to 2.65x and FLOPs by up to 61% on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU for the LLaVA-OneVision-7B model, while maintaining accuracy comparable to the full-token baseline. These improvements substantially enhance the practicality of deploying Video-LLMs in real-world production scenarios.

Video large language models (Video-LLMs) represent videos as dense sequences of visual tokens, whose length grows with the temporal and spatial extent of the input. These tokens often contain substantial redundancy arising from repeated visual patterns, leading to unnecessary computation in the subsequent language-model processing. Existing token compression methods, including pruning and merging, perform compression online during inference, repeatedly incurring additional computation for each input video and often relying on model-specific designs that limit their generality, we instead rethink this paradigm by shifting the costly compression process offline. We propose \textbf{ONCE}, a plug-in video token compression framework that introduces an offline-to-online paradigm: a frequency-aware global codebook is learned once in the visual feature space and reused for lightweight online compression through codebook lookup and aggregation, reducing repeated per-video computation and the need for model-specific compression designs. Extensive experiments across multiple video understanding benchmarks and against diverse compression baselines demonstrate that our approach achieves a strong accuracy-efficiency trade-off, maintaining competitive performance while achieving the lowest inference latency among compared methods.