# ShaRP: SHAllow-LayeR Pruning for Efficient Video Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05385 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05385/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [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)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [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)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12599/) (2025)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [LongVideoBench: A Benchmark for Long-context Interleaved Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15754/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-PruMerge: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15388/) (2024)
- [ShareGPT4Video: Improving Video Understanding and Generation with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04325/) (2024)
- [LMMs-Eval: Reality Check on the Evaluation of Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12772/) (2024)
- [PLLaVA : Parameter-free LLaVA Extension from Images to Videos for Video Dense Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16994/) (2024)
- [VisionZip: Longer is Better but Not Necessary in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04467/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) incur substantial prefilling cost due to the large number of visual tokens. While attention-based token pruning offers a promising acceleration strategy, applying it at shallow decoder layers often causes severe performance degradation under high compression ratios, limiting its practical benefits. In this work, we uncover an overlooked failure mode in shallow-layer attention pruning: attention scores in early decoder layers can become unreliable indicators of token utility, resulting in unstable token selection under aggressive compression. We show that this effect arises from the joint influence of insufficient token interaction, content-agnostic positional bias, and redundancy among high-attention tokens, which together distort attention-based importance estimation before informative representations fully emerge. Motivated by this insight, we propose ShaRP, a unified pruning framework that restores reliable attention-based token selection by jointly improving local information aggregation, calibrating positional bias, and reducing redundancy. Extensive evaluations show that ShaRP preserves about 97.2% of the original performance while reducing TFLOPs by 86% and achieving a 5.1x speedup in the prefilling stage, providing a scalable solution for efficient training-free VLLM inference.