[ICLR 2026] AgilePruner: An Empirical Study of Attention and Diversity for Adaptive Visual Token Pruning in Large Vision-Language Models

Changwoo Baek^*, Jouwon Song^*, Sohyeon Kim^*, Kyeongbo Kong^†

^*Equal contribution, ^†Corresponding author

🌐 Project Page | 📄 Paper

🎉 News

• [2026/01] 🔥 Our paper has been accepted to ICLR 2026! 🎊
• [2026/02] 🚀 Project page is now live!

📖 Overview

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have adopted visual token pruning strategies to mitigate substantial computational overhead incurred by extensive visual token sequences. While prior works primarily focus on either attention-based or diversity-based pruning methods, in-depth analysis of these approaches' characteristics and limitations remains largely unexplored.

In this work, we conduct thorough empirical analysis using effective rank (erank) as a measure of feature diversity and attention score entropy to investigate visual token processing mechanisms and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

🔍 Key Findings

Our analysis reveals two key insights:

1. Diversity aware hybrid pruning methods preserve less feature diversity than intended, and the diversity they do retain is closely tied to increased hallucination frequency compared to attention-based pruning.

2. Attention-based approaches are more effective on simple images where visual evidence is concentrated, while diversity-based methods better handle complex images with distributed features.

Building on these empirical insights, we show that incorporating image-aware adjustments into existing hybrid pruning strategies consistently improves their performance. We also provide a minimal instantiation of our empirical findings through a simple adaptive pruning mechanism.

💻 Code

Detailed implementation code is coming soon. 🚧

Stay tuned for updates! ⏳

📧 Contact

For questions or collaborations, please contact:

• Changwoo Baek
• Kyeongbo Kong (Corresponding author)

🙏 Acknowledgements

We thank LLaVA and FasterVLM for their excellent work and open-source contributions.

📜 License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0