发现视觉大模型深层令牌信息会消失,随机剪枝反而更优。
When Token Pruning is Worse than Random: Understanding Visual Token Information in VLLMs
- 通过移除令牌后输出变化衡量信息量,发现深层令牌信息趋同并失效。
- 在深度网络中,令牌信息在中间层达到‘信息边界’,之后冗余。
- 强模型更深使用令牌,适用于需要精细视觉的任务如OCR。
视觉大语言模型(VLLMs)因依赖数百个视觉令牌表示图像而产生高昂计算开销。尽管令牌剪枝被视为加速推理的有前景方案,但本文发现:在深层(如第20层以后),现有无训练剪枝方法性能不优于随机剪枝。我们提出‘令牌信息消失’假说——随着网络加深,视觉令牌的显著性逐渐减弱。通过测量移除令牌后模型输出概率的变化来量化其信息含量。分析显示:(1)随着层数加深,视觉令牌信息逐渐趋于一致,并在某一中间层完全消失,该层称为‘信息边界’,此后令牌冗余;(2)该边界位置非固定,视觉密集任务(如光学字符识别,OCR)比通用任务(如视觉问答,VQA)更深;(3)边界与模型容量强相关,更强模型(如Qwen2.5-VL)使用更深的视觉令牌,弱模型(如LLaVA-1.5)则较浅。基于此,我们在深层采用简单随机剪枝可有效平衡性能与效率。结合随机剪枝的DivPrune实现最优效果,仅剪掉50%视觉令牌,仍保持Qwen-2.5-VL-7B 96.9%性能。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) incur high computational costs due to their reliance on hundreds of visual tokens to represent images. While token pruning offers a promising solution for accelerating inference, this paper, however, identifies a key observation: in deeper layers (e.g., beyond the 20th), existing training-free pruning methods perform no better than random pruning. We hypothesize that this degradation is caused by \textbf{``vanishing token information''}, where visual tokens progressively lose their salience with increasing network depth. To validate this hypothesis, we quantify a token's information content by measuring the change in the model output probabilities upon its removal. Using this proposed metric, our analysis of the information of visual tokens across layers reveals three key findings: (1) As layers deepen, the information of visual tokens gradually becomes uniform and eventually vanishes at an intermediate layer, which we term as ``information horizon", beyond which the visual tokens become redundant; (2) The position of this horizon is not static; it extends deeper for visually intensive tasks, such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), compared to more general tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA); (3) This horizon is also strongly correlated with model capacity, as stronger VLLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL) employ deeper visual tokens than weaker models (e.g., LLaVA-1.5). Based on our findings, we show that simple random pruning in deep layers efficiently balances performance and efficiency. Moreover, integrating random pruning consistently enhances existing methods. Using DivPrune with random pruning achieves state-of-the-art results, maintaining 96.9\% of Qwen-2.5-VL-7B performance while pruning 50\% of visual tokens. The code is available at https://github.com/YahongWang1/Information-Horizon.
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