# Aggregating Visual Information with Optimal Transport for VideoLM Token Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20473 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20473/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 18 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 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, 18 of 18)

- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [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)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [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)
- [LLaVA-Video: Video Instruction Tuning With Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02713/) (2024)
- [ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02467/) (2019)
- [Long Context Transfer from Language to Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16852/) (2024)
- [LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08035/) (2024)
- [Chat-UniVi: Unified Visual Representation Empowers Large Language Models with Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08046/) (2023)
- [LongVU: Spatiotemporal Adaptive Compression for Long Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17434/) (2024)
- [Perception Test: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13786/) (2023)
- [Oryx MLLM: On-Demand Spatial-Temporal Understanding at Arbitrary Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12961/) (2024)
- [Q-Frame: Query-aware Frame Selection and Multi-Resolution Adaptation for Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22139/) (2025)
- [PACT: Pruning and Clustering-Based Token Reduction for Faster Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08966/) (2025)
- [CoPE-VideoLM: Leveraging Codec Primitives For Efficient Video Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13191/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video language models process videos as dense visual-token sequences with substantial representational redundancy. Compressing these sequences is therefore essential for reducing the visual-token burden on language-model decoding. The central challenge is to preserve visual information dispersed across frames under such compression. To this end, we introduce Aggregating Visual Information with Optimal Transport (AVIOT), which casts video token compression as transporting a dense empirical measure of frame observations onto a compact target measure. The resulting source-to-target coupling induces a distribution over source observations for each target support, directly specifying how the compressed video representation is constructed. We further adapt this construction along task and spatial axes. Question conditioning modulates the transport cost between source frames and target supports, while influencing how many supports are allocated to each temporal segment, thereby directing representation capacity toward question-relevant content. At multiple spatial granularities, AVIOT computes region-specific temporal transport plans and adaptively fuses the representations they yield, allowing different regions within the same compact representation to draw from different moments. Evaluations across varying compression ratios show that AVIOT matches or outperforms the uncompressed baseline on multiple video-understanding benchmarks while retaining strong performance at higher compression ratios.