提出联合量化与剪枝框架,高效压缩视觉语言模型推理开销。
Towards Joint Quantization and Token Pruning of Vision-Language Models

- 统一量化与剪枝流程,生成分层的令牌分配方案。
- 在W4A4低比特下保留30%视觉令牌,平均保留率达95.65%。
- 适合资源受限环境下部署视觉语言模型的工程师使用。
在极端低比特推理下部署视觉语言模型仍具挑战性,因预填充阶段的长视觉令牌前缀和自回归解码中不断增长的键值缓存导致计算开销巨大。令牌剪枝与低比特量化虽能互补降低开销,但传统分阶段组合常因量化校准与剪枝执行不匹配而表现脆弱。本文提出协同量化-剪枝框架,将低比特推理与确定性视觉令牌剪枝整合为单一可部署流水线。该框架引入QUOTA(Quantization Unified Offline Token Allocator),将低比特校准信号转化为分层令牌分配计划,并生成剪枝配方。通过结合激活幅度、注意力线索及显式低比特风险信号,在量化键值缓存下评估令牌重要性,实现稳定预算内顶-k选择。在标准视觉语言模型基准测试中,该方法在相同低比特条件下显著提升鲁棒性,相较典型分阶段方案,以仅30%视觉令牌实现95.65%平均保留率,优于约94.3%的基线表现。代码将公开发布。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) under aggressive low-bit inference remains challenging because inference cost is dominated by the long visual-token prefix during prefill and the growing KV cache during autoregressive decoding. Token pruning and low-bit quantization are complementary for reducing these costs, yet naive stage-wise combinations are often brittle due to a mismatch between quantization calibration and pruning execution. We present a collaborative quantization-and-pruning framework that unifies low-bit inference and deterministic visual-token pruning in a single deployable pipeline. The framework introduces the \textbf{Q}uantization \textbf{U}nified \textbf{O}ffline \textbf{T}oken \textbf{A}llocator (\textbf{QUOTA}), which converts low-bit calibration signals into a layer-wise token allocation schedule and materializes it as a pruning recipe. Token importance is evaluated under deployed W4A4 operators with a quantized KV cache by combining activation magnitude, attention cues, and an explicit low-bit risk signal, enabling consistent budgeted top-$k$ selection. Experiments on standard VLM benchmarks show improved robustness over stage-wise baselines under the same low-bit regime, achieving 95.65\% average retention while retaining only 30\% of visual tokens, compared with about 94.3\% retention for representative stage-wise combinations. The code will be released.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。