# HieraVid: Hierarchical Token Pruning for Fast Video Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01881 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01881/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Visual token pruning in multimodal models, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 30 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- 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 30)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [SparseVLM: Visual Token Sparsification for Efficient Vision-Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04417/) (2024)
- [LongVU: Spatiotemporal Adaptive Compression for Long Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17434/) (2024)
- [PLLaVA : Parameter-free LLaVA Extension from Images to Videos for Video Dense Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16994/) (2024)
- [PyramidDrop: Accelerating Your Large Vision-Language Models via Pyramid Visual Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17247/) (2024)
- [Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14160/) (2023)
- [VideoChat-Flash: Hierarchical Compression for Long-Context Video Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00574/) (2024)
- [Video-XL: Extra-Long Vision Language Model for Hour-Scale Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14485/) (2024)
- [Stop Looking for Important Tokens in Multimodal Language Models: Duplication Matters More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11494/) (2025)
- [MiniGPT4-Video: Advancing Multimodal LLMs for Video Understanding with Interleaved Visual-Textual Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03413/) (2024)
- [Video-LaVIT: Unified Video-Language Pre-training with Decoupled Visual-Motional Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03161/) (2024)
- [Beyond Attention or Similarity: Maximizing Conditional Diversity for Token Pruning in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10967/) (2025)
- [FrameFusion: Combining Similarity and Importance for Video Token Reduction on Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01986/) (2024)
- [Dynamic-VLM: Simple Dynamic Visual Token Compression for VideoLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09530/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [OmniDelta: Skill-Driven Budget Allocation for Token Compression in OmniLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25669/) (2026)
- [Why Is Video Still So Expensive? A Survey of Inference-Efficiency Mechanisms in Video and Audiovisual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10355/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in video understanding, yet the massive number of input video tokens incurs a significant computational burden for deployment. Existing methods mainly prune video tokens at input level while neglecting the inherent information structure embedded in videos and large language models (LLMs). To address this, we propose HieraVid, a hierarchical pruning framework that progressively and dynamically reduces visual redundancy. Based on two observations that videos possess the segment-frame structure and LLMs internally propagate multi-modal information unidirectionally, we decompose pruning into three levels: 1) segment-level, where video tokens are first temporally segmented and spatially merged; 2) frame-level, where similar frames within the same segment are jointly pruned to preserve diversity; 3) layer-level, redundancy gradually shrinks as LLM layer increases w/o compromising performance. We conduct extensive experiments on four widely used video understanding benchmarks to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of HieraVid. Remarkably, with only 30% of tokens retained, HieraVid achieves new state-of-the-art performance, while maintaining over 98% and 99% of the performance of LLaVA-Video-7B and LLaVA-OneVision-7B, respectively.