arXiv:2508.17807cs.CV2025-08被引 3

修复视觉语言模型中注意力偏差,提升剪枝准确性。

Attention Debiasing for Token Pruning in Vision Language Models

  • 通过消除位置偏见和注意力陷阱,重构注意力重要性度量。
  • 在10个基准上优于7种主流剪枝方法,性能显著提升。
  • 无需修改模型架构,可直接集成到现有剪枝方案中。

视觉语言模型(VLMs)通常包含远多于文本标记的视觉标记,导致大量冗余。剪枝无信息视觉标记对提升计算效率至关重要,而语言到视觉的注意力已成为常用的重要性判据。然而我们发现,VLM中的注意力存在系统性偏差:过度关注序列后部的标记,表现为对图像下部区域的过强关注,并给语义空白的填充标记赋予过高评分。这些行为源于大语言模型(LLMs)继承的内在时间偏好与注意力黑洞效应,扭曲了基于注意力的剪枝结果,导致无关视觉内容被保留。为此,我们提出两种轻量级但有效的去偏技术:第一,通过消除由时间偏好引起的注意力趋势,生成与位置无关、内容感知的重要度量;第二,通过抑制填充标记上的虚假注意力,缓解注意力黑洞效应。本方法具备模型无关、剪枝方法无关和任务无关特性,可即插即用地集成至现有VLM剪枝框架。尽管结构简单,但持续带来显著性能提升。我们在涵盖图像与视频任务的10个视觉语言基准上评估,对比7种先进剪枝方法及2种代表性VLM架构,结果表明该方法具有强大有效性与泛化能力。代码已开源:https://github.com/intcomp/attention-bias。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Vision-language models (VLMs) typically encode substantially more visual tokens than text tokens, resulting in significant token redundancy. Pruning uninformative visual tokens is therefore crucial for improving computational efficiency, and language-to-vision attention has become a widely used importance criterion for this purpose. However, we find that attention in VLMs is systematically biased. It disproportionately favors tokens appearing later in the sequence, manifesting as over-attention to lower image regions, and assigns inflated scores to semantically empty padding tokens. These behaviors stem from intrinsic recency bias and attention sink effects inherited from large language models (LLMs), and they distort attention-based pruning by preserving irrelevant visual content. To derive a pruning criterion better aligned with semantic relevance, we introduce two lightweight yet effective debiasing techniques that restore the reliability of attention. The first compensates for positional distortions by removing recency-induced attention trends, producing a content-aware and position-agnostic importance measure. The second suppresses attention sink effects by eliminating spurious attention on padding tokens. Our method is model-agnostic, pruning-method-agnostic, and task-agnostic, enabling plug-and-play integration with existing VLM pruning models. Despite its simplicity, our approach consistently delivers strong performance gains. We evaluate our method on ten vision-language benchmarks spanning both image-based and video-based tasks, in comparison with seven state-of-the-art visual token pruning methods and across two representative VLM architectures. Our method achieves substantial performance gains, demonstrating strong effectiveness and generalizability. Our code is available at https://github.com/intcomp/attention-bias.

视觉语言模型注意力机制剪枝去偏

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