One Layer's Trash is Another Layer's Treasure: Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection in LVLMs
This work addresses the performance degradation in existing large vision-language models caused by static visual token pruning, which permanently discards information inaccessible to subsequent layers. To overcome this limitation, the authors propose an adaptive, hierarchical visual token selection mechanism that dynamically determines, via lightweight selectors, which tokens to process or skip at each layer, followed by cross-layer token fusion—enabling full-model adaptive compression without retraining. Key innovations include layer-wise differentiated token retention and reuse, a low-rank attention approximation guided by importance consistency constraints, and a multi-stream token routing and fusion strategy. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and Qwen2.5-VL demonstrate that retaining only 11% of the original visual tokens achieves 96.7% of the baseline model’s accuracy.