# QMoP: Query Guided Mixture-of-Projector for Efficient Visual Token Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21232 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21232/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 38 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2026.

## 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 38)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (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)
- [MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02813/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-PruMerge: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15388/) (2024)
- [SparseVLM: Visual Token Sparsification for Efficient Vision-Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04417/) (2024)
- [VisionZip: Longer is Better but Not Necessary in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04467/) (2024)
- [PyramidDrop: Accelerating Your Large Vision-Language Models via Pyramid Visual Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17247/) (2024)
- [Honeybee: Locality-enhanced Projector for Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06742/) (2023)
- [MobileVLM V2: Faster and Stronger Baseline for Vision Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03766/) (2024)
- [TokenPacker: Efficient Visual Projector for Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02392/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-Mini: Efficient Image and Video Large Multimodal Models with One Vision Token](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03895/) (2025)
- [Stop Looking for Important Tokens in Multimodal Language Models: Duplication Matters More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11494/) (2025)
- [Boosting Multimodal Large Language Models with Visual Tokens Withdrawal for Rapid Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05803/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Sub-Token Routing for KV Cache Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21335/) (2026)
- [PARCEL: Pool-Anchored Resampling with Conditioned Elastic Queries for Efficient Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30126/) (2026)
- [Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Sample-Adaptive Strategy Routing for Vision Token Pruning in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10346/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large language models suffer from severe computational and memory bottlenecks, as the number of visual tokens far exceeds that of textual tokens. While recent methods employ projector modules to align and compress visual tokens into text-aligned features, they typically depend on fixed heuristics that limit adaptability across diverse scenarios. In this paper, we first propose Query Guided Mixture-of-Projector (QMoP), a novel and flexible framework that adaptively compresses visual tokens via three collaborative branches: (1) a pooling-based branch for coarse-grained global semantics, (2) a resampler branch for extracting high-level semantic representations, and (3) a pruning-based branch for fine-grained token selection to preserve critical visual detail. To adaptively coordinate these branches, we introduce the Query Guided Router (QGR), which dynamically selects and weights the outputs from different branches based on both visual input and textual queries. A Mixture-of-Experts-style fusion mechanism is designed to aggregate the outputs, harnessing the strengths of each strategy while suppressing noise. To systematically evaluate the effects of Visual Token Compression, we also develop VTCBench, a dedicated benchmark for evaluating the information loss induced by visual token compression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that despite relying on fundamental compression modules, QMoP outperforms strong baselines and delivers significant savings in memory, computation, and inference time.