Sparsity Forcing: Reinforcing Token Sparsity of MLLMs

Sparse attention mechanisms aim to reduce computational overhead with minimal accuracy loss by selectively processing salient tokens. Despite their effectiveness, most methods merely exploit a model's inherent sparsity and thus plateau at moderate budgets (about 50% token reduction), with little headroom to push budget lower without hurting accuracy. Other approaches attempt to enforce sparsity through trainable sparse attention or sharpness-inducing regularizers, but these either fix rigid patterns that ignore input and layer dynamics, or optimize proxy objectives without direct control over token budgets. In this paper, we explicitly reinforce token sparsity in well-posed multimodal large language models (MLLMs) through a simple RL-based post-training framework named textitSparsity Forcing. Our method explores the efficiency-accuracy trade-off by running multiple rollouts with different token budgets, where both efficiency (token reduction ratio) and performance (answer correctness) are formulated as joint rewards. By contrasting rollouts within each group, the more efficient and correct answer is rewarded while less efficient or incorrect ones are penalized, thereby turning token saving into an end-to-end, inference-consistent optimization objective. Across thirteen image and video benchmarks, Sparsity Forcing raises token reduction ratio on Qwen2-VL/Qwen2.5-VL from 20% to 75% with minimal accuracy decline, significantly reducing long-context inference memory by up to 3× while speeding up decoding by up to 3.3×.