cs.CVOct 1, 2026

MWOP: Modality-aware Width-wise Operation Pruning for Efficient MLLMs

Authors: Xudong Wang, Hao Wu, Haozhe Hu, Peiran Yin, Xinghao Chen, Yunpu Ma, Wei Zhang, Xiaoyu Shen

Organizations: EIT-NLP Lab, Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · Munich Center for Machine Learning, LMU Munich

Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) incur substantial inference costs when processing long visual-textual sequences. While existing operation compression methods exploit modality-level redundancy, they largely treat computation within attention heads and shared feed-forward network (FFN) channels as unified units, leaving finer-grained redundancy underexplored. We find that redundancy varies both across modality-interaction paths within the same attention head and across visual and textual executions of the same FFN channel. Based on these findings, we propose Modality-aware Width-wise Operation Pruning (MWOP), which independently prunes visual-to-visual (V2V), text-to-visual (T2V), and text-to-text (T2T) attention paths within each layer, and separately selects FFN channels for visual and textual inputs. A first-order Taylor criterion guides the pruning process, with FFN importance re-evaluated after attention pruning and LoRA-based recovery training. To translate the resulting fine-grained sparsity into practical acceleration, we further develop path-sparse Triton attention kernels and compact visual-side FFN execution. MWOP preserves the token sequence while reducing attention and FFN computation, making it complementary to token compression and enabling simultaneous reduction of sequence length and per-token computation. On LLaVA-OneVision-7B, MWOP alone achieves a 1.6×1.6\times prefill speedup with 99.7% average performance retention across 12 benchmarks. Combined with two representative token compression methods, it further increases their prefill speedups from 2.0×2.0\times and 1.9×1.9\times to 2.9×2.9\times and 2.7×2.7\times, respectively. Results on Qwen2.5-VL-7B further demonstrate its applicability across architectures. The code is available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/MWOP.

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