Paper Detail
Qiyanhui Lu, Han Wu, Rongjian Xu, Tingzhang Luo, Cheng Fan, Xinghao Chen, Minjing Dong, Jufeng Yang, Jianyuan Guo
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) encode images as long visual token sequences, making prefilling and KV-cache storage expensive. Existing training-free pruning methods select tokens by importance, diversity, or spatial coverage, but treat retained tokens as interchangeable and do not explicitly track which object-related regions are already covered. We present RoRA, a training-free framework that casts visual token pruning as role-oriented regional evidence allocation. Given a fixed budget, RoRA partitions tokens into a protected semantic core, complementary context, and fine-grained detail. It first calibrates text-conditioned attention with a positional prior and a prompt-calibrated object prior, then builds Attention-Anchored Regions (AARs) from high-confidence anchors as lightweight proxies for covered object support. Context is explored mainly outside AARs, while a small AAR-guided budget restores local detail; pairwise similarity is used only for context-stage redundancy filtering. Under matched budgets, RoRA consistently outperforms strong training-free baselines across LLaVA and Qwen-VL families, retaining most of the unpruned accuracy even at aggressive pruning ratios, e.g., 96.5% of full performance at 88.9% pruning on LLaVA-1.5, and improving over D2Pruner by about 5% on Qwen3-VL at 75-90% pruning. At a 66.7% pruning ratio, RoRA requires only 0.7 ms for token selection and reduces end-to-end inference time by 24.6%, corresponding to a 1.33x speedup over unpruned inference on an NVIDIA H800.
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@article{lu2026rora,
title = {RoRA: Role-Oriented Regional Allocation for Visual Token Pruning in MLLMs},
author = {Qiyanhui Lu and Han Wu and Rongjian Xu and Tingzhang Luo and Cheng Fan and Xinghao Chen and Minjing Dong and Jufeng Yang and Jianyuan Guo},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) encode images as long visual token sequences, making prefilling and KV-cache storage expensive. Existing training-free pruning methods select tokens by importance, diversity, or spatial coverage, but treat retained tokens as interchangeable and do not explicitly track which object-related regions are already covered. We present RoRA, a training-free framework that casts visual token pruning as role-oriented regional evidence allocation. Given a fixed budg},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07088},
keywords = {cs.CV, cs.AI},
eprint = {2608.07088},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}