# Layer-Aware Position Embeddings for Visual Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23715/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Visual token pruning and efficiency, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 19 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 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, 19 of 19)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [Beyond Text-Visual Attention: Exploiting Visual Cues for Effective Token Pruning in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01818/) (2024)
- [Stop Looking for Important Tokens in Multimodal Language Models: Duplication Matters More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11494/) (2025)
- [Beyond Attention or Similarity: Maximizing Conditional Diversity for Token Pruning in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10967/) (2025)
- [Vision Function Layer in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24791/) (2025)
- [When Token Pruning is Worse than Random: Understanding Visual Token Information in VLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07580/) (2025)
- [IVC-Prune: Revealing the Implicit Visual Coordinates in LVLMs for Vision Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03060/) (2026)
- [Grounding-Aware Token Pruning: Recovering from Drastic Performance Drops in Visual Grounding Caused by Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21873/) (2025)
- [Improving Visual Token Reduction via Rectifying Distortions for Efficient Multimodal LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01711/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the reliance on hundreds of visual tokens to represent images. While token pruning has emerged as a promising approach to reduce the inference cost of MLLMs, existing methods typically reassign position embeddings to the retained tokens using either sparse or continuous position embeddings, each introducing distinct limitations. Sparse position embeddings tend to decrease the attention value allocated to visual tokens, thereby degrading the perception capability of MLLMs, whereas continuous position embeddings disrupt the original spatial correspondence of visual tokens, leading to weakened grounding capability. To mitigate this issue, we perform layer-wise analysis of the language decoder and observe that intermediate layers play a critical role for maintaining the grounding capability of MLLMs under token pruning. Based on this observation, we propose a layer-aware position embedding strategy, which switches to sparse position embeddings at grounding-sensitive layers while maintaining continuous position embeddings elsewhere. Extensive experiments across representative pruning methods and diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach improves the comprehensive multimodal performance of pruned MLLMs compared with standard sparse and continuous position embeddings.