# Beyond Attention or Similarity: Maximizing Conditional Diversity for Token Pruning in MLLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10967 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10967/

## Key facts

- Cited by 96 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Visual token pruning and efficiency, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 64 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Visual token pruning and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/visual-token-pruning-and-efficiency/)
- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Visual token pruning in multimodal models](https://mlsanity.com/inference/visual-token-pruning-in-multimodal-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 96)

- [The Better You Learn, The Smarter You Prune: Towards Efficient Vision-language-action Models via Differentiable Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12594/) (2025)
- [TIGeR: Tool-Integrated Geometric Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07181/) (2025)
- [FastDriveVLA: Efficient End-to-End Driving via Plug-and-Play Reconstruction-based Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23318/) (2025)
- [A Glimpse to Compress: Dynamic Visual Token Pruning for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01548/) (2025)
- [CATP: Contextually Adaptive Token Pruning for Efficient and Enhanced Multimodal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07871/) (2025)
- [TrimTokenator-LC: Towards Adaptive Visual Token Pruning for Large Multimodal Models with Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22748/) (2025)
- [When Token Pruning is Worse than Random: Understanding Visual Token Information in VLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07580/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Visual Token Reduction in LVLMs Under Cross-Modal Misalignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22283/) (2025)
- [HiPrune: Hierarchical Attention for Efficient Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00553/) (2025)
- [Make Each Token Count: Towards Improving Long-Context Performance with KV Cache Eviction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09649/) (2026)
- [ViCA: Efficient Multimodal LLMs with Vision-Only Cross-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07574/) (2026)
- [TrimTokenator: Towards Adaptive Visual Token Pruning for Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00320/) (2025)
- [Efficient Inference for Large Vision-Language Models: Bottlenecks, Techniques, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05546/) (2026)
- [SaPaVe: Towards Active Perception and Manipulation in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12193/) (2026)
- [VLM-Pruner: Buffering for Spatial Sparsity in an Efficient VLM Centrifugal Token Pruning Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02700/) (2025)
- [AngelSlim: A more accessible, comprehensive, and efficient toolkit for large model compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21233/) (2026)
- [Photon: Speedup Volume Understanding with Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25155/) (2026)
- [MathSticks: A Benchmark for Visual Symbolic Compositional Reasoning with Matchstick Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00483/) (2025)
- [IDPruner: Harmonizing Importance and Diversity in Visual Token Pruning for MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13315/) (2026)
- [EvoPrune: Early-Stage Visual Token Pruning for Efficient MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03681/) (2026)
- [EgoPrune: Efficient Token Pruning for Egomotion Video Reasoning in Embodied Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15428/) (2025)
- [Attention Debiasing for Token Pruning in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17807/) (2025)
- [Stateful Token Reduction for Long-Video Hybrid VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00198/) (2026)
- [RTPrune: Reading-Twice Inspired Token Pruning for Efficient DeepSeek-OCR Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00392/) (2026)
- [AVIS: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11576/) (2026)
- [TransPrune: Token Transition Pruning for Efficient Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20630/) (2025)
- [Focus-Scan-Refine: From Human Visual Perception to Efficient Visual Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05809/) (2026)
- [HAWK: Head Importance-Aware Visual Token Pruning in Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07812/) (2026)
- [OccamToken: Efficient VLM Inference with Training-Free and Budget-Adaptive Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29657/) (2026)
- [SAFE-Pruner: Semantic Attention-Guided Future-Aware Token Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29662/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the length of input visual tokens is often significantly greater than that of their textual counterparts, leading to a high inference cost. Many works aim to address this issue by removing redundant visual tokens. However, current approaches either rely on attention-based pruning, which retains numerous duplicate tokens, or use similarity-based pruning, overlooking the instruction relevance, consequently causing suboptimal performance. In this paper, we go beyond attention or similarity by proposing a novel visual token pruning method named CDPruner, which maximizes the conditional diversity of retained tokens. We first define the conditional similarity between visual tokens conditioned on the instruction, and then reformulate the token pruning problem with determinantal point process (DPP) to maximize the conditional diversity of the selected subset. The proposed CDPruner is training-free and model-agnostic, allowing easy application to various MLLMs. Extensive experiments across diverse MLLMs show that CDPruner establishes new state-of-the-art on various vision-language benchmarks. By maximizing conditional diversity through DPP, the selected subset better represents the input images while closely adhering to user instructions, thereby preserving strong performance even with high reduction ratios. When applied to LLaVA, CDPruner reduces FLOPs by 95% and CUDA latency by 78%, while maintaining 94% of the original accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/Theia-4869/CDPruner.