Yucheng Wang
Publications
SepPrune:A Separator-based Pruning Framework for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as Qwen2.5-VL and InternVL3, generate large numbers of vision tokens for high-resolution inputs, leading to substantial computational cost. Existing vision token pruning methods either depend on cross-modal attention and cannot prune before the prefill stage, or rely on diversity estimation with high computational overhead. We observe that attention scores from both vision and text tokens peak at modality separator tokens, suggesting that these separators bridge the two modalities. Based on this observation, we propose SepPrune, an efficient, training-free, plug-and-play pruning method that uses the separator token as a unified query to rank and select informative vision tokens. SepPrune reuses the LLM's built-in projection parameters and requires no architectural changes. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that SepPrune achieves state-of-the-art performance, retaining 96.3% of the original accuracy while removing 80.2% of vision tokens.
RP-OPSD: Resolution-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Multimodal Large Language Models
On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) uses privileged information available only to the teacher to provide dense token-level supervision on trajectories generated by the student. However, existing methods often rely on verified solution traces, explanations generated by external models, or manually localized visual evidence, which limits their scalable application to multimodal large language models. To address this issue, we exploit the information gap between high- and low-resolution views of the same image and propose RP-OPSD (Resolution-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Multimodal Large Language Models). During training, the student policy generates on-policy trajectories from images at one-quarter of the original resolution, while the teacher policy provides supervision using the original-resolution images. By minimizing the divergence between their output distributions along the student trajectories, the student learns the predictive behavior of the teacher under high-resolution inputs, thereby strengthening its low-resolution capability and transferring the learned improvement to original-resolution inference. RP-OPSD requires neither additional human annotations nor external models to generate solution traces but only image--question pairs. Experiments on Qwen3.5-9B show that RP-OPSD achieves a 5.45\% relative improvement in average performance at the original resolution and a $1.78\times$ training speedup over OPSD. These results demonstrate that resolution differences can serve as a simple and scalable source of privileged information, providing an effective and efficient approach to on-policy self-distillation for multimodal large language models.