# OmniSIFT: Modality-Asymmetric Token Compression for Efficient Omni-modal Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04804 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04804/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio and omni-modal token compression, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 37 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Audio and omni-modal token compression](https://mlsanity.com/inference/audio-and-omni-modal-token-compression/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [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)
- [FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08608/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17765/) (2025)
- [Look, Listen and Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08168/) (2017)
- [VisionZip: Longer is Better but Not Necessary in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04467/) (2024)
- [LongVILA: Scaling Long-Context Visual Language Models for Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10188/) (2024)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [LLaVA-OneVision-1.5: Fully Open Framework for Democratized Multimodal Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23661/) (2025)
- [WorldSense: Evaluating Real-world Omnimodal Understanding for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04326/) (2025)
- [Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Interwoven Thinking and Visual Drawing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09965/) (2025)
- [WavTokenizer: an Efficient Acoustic Discrete Codec Tokenizer for Audio Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16532/) (2024)
- [Fit and Prune: Fast and Training-free Visual Token Pruning for Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10197/) (2024)
- [Daily-Omni: Towards Audio-Visual Reasoning with Temporal Alignment across Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17862/) (2025)
- [TimeChat-Online: 80% Visual Tokens are Naturally Redundant in Streaming Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17343/) (2025)
- [OmniVideoBench: Towards Audio-Visual Understanding Evaluation for Omni MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10689/) (2025)
- [STORM: Token-Efficient Long Video Understanding for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04130/) (2025)
- [Don't Just Chase "Highlighted Tokens" in MLLMs: Revisiting Visual Holistic Context Retention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02912/) (2025)
- [Filter, Correlate, Compress: Training-Free Token Reduction for MLLM Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17686/) (2024)
- [Video Compression Commander: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14454/) (2025)
- [Accelerating Streaming Video Large Language Models via Hierarchical Token Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00891/) (2025)
- [Global Compression Commander: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for High-Resolution Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05179/) (2025)
- [Variation-aware Vision Token Dropping for Faster Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01552/) (2025)
- [AVoCaDO: An Audiovisual Video Captioner Driven by Temporal Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10395/) (2025)
- [From Specific-MLLMs to Omni-MLLMs: A Survey on MLLMs Aligned with Multi-modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11694/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [LVOmniBench: Pioneering Long Audio-Video Understanding Evaluation for Omnimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19217/) (2026)
- [OmniGAIA: Towards Native Omni-Modal AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22897/) (2026)
- [Imagination Helps Visual Reasoning, But Not Yet in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22766/) (2026)
- [AndroTMem: From Interaction Trajectories to Anchored Memory in Long-Horizon GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18429/) (2026)
- [GIFT: Global Irreplaceability Frame Targeting for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25072/) (2026)
- [LatentOmni: Rethinking Omni-Modal Understanding via Unified Audio-Visual Latent Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22012/) (2026)
- [OmniDrop: Layer-wise Token Pruning for Omni-modal LLMs via Query-Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14458/) (2026)
- [OmniSelect: Dynamic Modality-Aware Token Compression for Efficient Omni-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18041/) (2026)
- [OpenWorldLib: A Unified Codebase and Definition of Advanced World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04707/) (2026)
- [Keep What Audio Cannot Say: Context-Preserving Token Pruning for Omni-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11605/) (2026)
- [OmniRefine: Alignment-Aware Cooperative Compression for Efficient Omnimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12056/) (2026)
- [Stage-adaptive Token Selection for Efficient Omni-modal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20035/) (2026)
- [AVOC: Enhancing Hour-Level Audio-Video Understanding in Omni-Modal LLMs via Retrieval-Inspired Token Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24286/) (2026)
- [OmniPack: Unified Token Compression for Efficient Omni-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03812/) (2026)
- [V-CAST: Video Curvature-Aware Spatio-Temporal Pruning for Efficient Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27650/) (2026)
- [OmniFocus: Query-Guided Modality-Balanced Token Compression for Omni-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03050/) (2026)
- [Out of Sight, Still in Mind: Token Compression for Omni-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21179/) (2026)
- [HeadRouter: Dynamic Head-Weight Routing for Task-Adaptive Audio Token Pruning in Large Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23717/) (2026)
- [TraceAV-Bench: Benchmarking Multi-Hop Trajectory Reasoning over Long Audio-Visual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07593/) (2026)
- [From Senses to Decisions: The Information Flow of Auditory and Visual Perception in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10147/) (2026)
- [OmniScope: Modality-Decoupled Token Compression for Omnimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23193/) (2026)
- [OmniDelta: Skill-Driven Budget Allocation for Token Compression in OmniLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25669/) (2026)
- [Allocation Before Ranking: Decoupled Token Compression for OmniLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01665/) (2026)
- [LEAP: Learned Block-wise Evidence Retrieval for Long Audio-Video Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39938/) (2026)
- [OmniSeek: Native Tool Integration for Multi-turn Audio-Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02181/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Omni-modal Large Language Models (Omni-LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in audio-video understanding tasks. However, their reliance on long multimodal token sequences leads to substantial computational overhead. Despite this challenge, token compression methods designed for Omni-LLMs remain limited. To bridge this gap, we propose OmniSIFT (Omni-modal Spatio-temporal Informed Fine-grained Token compression), a modality-asymmetric token compression framework tailored for Omni-LLMs. Specifically, OmniSIFT adopts a two-stage compression strategy: (i) a spatio-temporal video pruning module that removes video redundancy arising from both intra-frame structure and inter-frame overlap, and (ii) a vision-guided audio selection module that filters audio tokens. The entire framework is optimized end-to-end via a differentiable straight-through estimator. Extensive experiments on five representative benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of OmniSIFT. Notably, for Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, OmniSIFT introduces only 4.85M parameters while maintaining lower latency than training-free baselines such as OmniZip. With merely 25% of the original token context, OmniSIFT consistently outperforms all compression baselines and even surpasses the performance of the full-token model on several tasks.