HiPrune: Hierarchical Attention for Efficient Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) encode images and videos into abundant tokens, which contain substantial redundancy and computation cost. While visual token pruning mitigates the issue, most existing methods lack insight into the intrinsic property of the vision encoder itself. In this work, we dive into the vision encoder and prove that the middle layers pay more attention to the main objects of the image qualitatively and quantitatively, while the deep layers to tokens with rich global information. Utilizing this Hierarchical attention pattern, we propose HiPrune, a training-free and model-agnostic token Pruning method. HiPrune identifies three types of visual tokens according to their attention in different phases of the vision encoder, which preserves different levels of information. By coupling with the similarity of text tokens, we propose a prompt-aware variance, HiPrune++, which further improves instruction following performance under a very low token budget. Extensive experiments across four representative VLMs show that HiPrune achieves up to 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens, while reducing inference FLOPs by 58.7%. HiPrune++ maintains up to 99.7% accuracy with 2/9 tokens, highlighting robustness under high-resolution. Our code is available at https://github.com/Danielement321/HiPrune.