# Towards Efficient VLMs: Information-Theoretic Driven Compression via Adaptive Structural Pruning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19518 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19518/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 40 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Visual token pruning and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/visual-token-pruning-and-efficiency/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [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)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (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)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning and the Information Bottleneck Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02406/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06764/) (2024)
- [KIVI: A Tuning-Free Asymmetric 2bit Quantization for KV Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02750/) (2024)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [OmniQuant: Omnidirectionally Calibrated Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13137/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-PruMerge: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15388/) (2024)
- [Optimal Brain Compression: A Framework for Accurate Post-Training Quantization and Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11580/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12320/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Model Compression for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07633/) (2023)
- [SVD-LLM: Truncation-aware Singular Value Decomposition for Large Language Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07378/) (2024)
- [An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17247/) (2024)
- [SVDQuant: Absorbing Outliers by Low-Rank Components for 4-Bit Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05007/) (2024)
- [The Truth is in There: Improving Reasoning in Language Models with Layer-Selective Rank Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13558/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Reasoning-preserved Efficient Distillation of Large Language Models via Activation-aware Initialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29327/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable performance across multimodal tasks, yet their ever-growing scale poses severe challenges for deployment and efficiency. Existing compression methods often rely on heuristic importance metrics or empirical pruning rules, lacking theoretical guarantees about information preservation. In this work, we propose InfoPrune, an information-theoretic framework for adaptive structural compression of VLMs. Grounded in the Information Bottleneck principle, we formulate pruning as a trade-off between retaining task-relevant semantics and discarding redundant dependencies. To quantify the contribution of each attention head, we introduce an entropy-based effective rank (eRank) and employ the Kolmogorov--Smirnov (KS) distance to measure the divergence between original and compressed structures. This yields a unified criterion that jointly considers structural sparsity and informational efficiency. Building on this foundation, we further design two complementary schemes: (1) a training-based head pruning guided by the proposed information loss objective, and (2) a training-free FFN compression via adaptive low-rank approximation. Extensive experiments on VQAv2, TextVQA, and GQA demonstrate that InfoPrune achieves up to 3.2x FLOP reduction and 1.8x acceleration with negligible performance degradation, establishing a theoretically grounded and practically effective step toward efficient multimodal large models.