Papers › VisionZip: Longer is Better but Not Necessary in Vision Language Models

VisionZip: Longer is Better but Not Necessary in Vision Language Models

5 Dec 2024CVPR 2025 1arXiv:2412.04467archive 2025-07-28

Senqiao Yang, Yukang Chen, Zhuotao Tian, Chengyao Wang, Jingyao Li, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia

Recent advancements in vision-language models have enhanced performance by increasing the length of visual tokens, making them much longer than text tokens and significantly raising computational costs. However, we observe that the visual tokens generated by popular vision encoders, such as CLIP and SigLIP, contain significant redundancy. To address this, we introduce VisionZip, a simple yet effective method that selects a set of informative tokens for input to the language model, reducing visual token redundancy and improving efficiency while maintaining model performance. The proposed VisionZip can be widely applied to image and video understanding tasks and is well-suited for multi-turn dialogues in real-world scenarios, where previous methods tend to underperform. Experimental results show that VisionZip outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by at least 5% performance gains across nearly all settings. Moreover, our method significantly enhances model inference speed, improving the prefilling time by 8x and enabling the LLaVA-Next 13B model to infer faster than the LLaVA-Next 7B model while achieving better results. Furthermore, we analyze the causes of this redundancy and encourage the community to focus on extracting better visual features rather than merely increasing token length. Our code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/VisionZip .

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dvlab-research/visionzip officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report

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rotate_half dvlab-research/visionzip/Qwen2_5_VL/qwen2_5vl_visionzip.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e03d53ba9d4f9ae5 · report
CLIPAttention_forward dvlab-research/visionzip/visionzip/utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 994ad8442c3d6ae8 · report
CLIP_EncoderLayer_forward dvlab-research/visionzip/visionzip/utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 27a169cf3a211ef5 · report
apply_rotary_pos_emb_flashatt dvlab-research/visionzip/Qwen2_5_VL/qwen2_5vl_visionzip.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 56baaa3cae2a8e1f · report
apply_rotary_pos_emb_vision dvlab-research/visionzip/Qwen2_5_VL/qwen2_5vl_visionzip.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 50a09accb6ca2549 · report
encode_images_visionzip dvlab-research/visionzip/visionzip/llava_arch.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 1585cd5e445a26b9 · report
encode_images_visionzip_multi dvlab-research/visionzip/visionzip/llava_arch.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e8c6fd834f76c9b1 · report
load_image dvlab-research/visionzip/gradio_demo.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 7db2c78b1f3cc693 · report
parse_r dvlab-research/visionzip/visionzip/utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · a54840c2e71e73aa · report
resize_image dvlab-research/visionzip/gradio_demo.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f170144b6e9abcec · report
restore_image_features_sorted dvlab-research/visionzip/visionzip/llava_arch.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · cbc15a0bfa5bc165 · report

Tasks

Video UnderstandingVisual Question Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet VisionZip (Retain 128 Tokens, fine-tuning) GPT-4 score 32.9 #177 of 231 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet VisionZip (Retain 192 Tokens, fine-tuning) GPT-4 score 32.6 #181 of 231 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet VisionZip (Retain 128 Tokens) GPT-4 score 32.6 #182 of 231 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet VisionZip (Retain 192 Tokens) GPT-4 score 31.7 #191 of 231 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet VisionZip (Retain 64 Tokens) GPT-4 score 31.7 #192 of 231 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet VisionZip (Retain 64 Tokens, fine-tuning) GPT-4 score 30.2 #207 of 231 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

CLIPFocusSET

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