TokenPacker: Efficient Visual Projector for Multimodal LLM

TL;DR

TokenPacker introduces a coarse-to-fine visual projection method that significantly reduces visual token redundancy in multimodal LLMs, enhancing efficiency without sacrificing reasoning performance.

Contribution

It proposes a novel coarse-to-fine visual projector that condenses visual tokens by 75-89% using multi-level region cues, improving efficiency while maintaining or improving performance.

Findings

Reduces visual tokens by up to 89%.

Achieves comparable or better performance on benchmarks.

Enhances MLLM efficiency significantly.

Abstract

The visual projector serves as an essential bridge between the visual encoder and the Large Language Model (LLM) in a Multimodal LLM (MLLM). Typically, MLLMs adopt a simple MLP to preserve all visual contexts via one-to-one transformation. However, the visual tokens are redundant and can be considerably increased when dealing with high-resolution images, impairing the efficiency of MLLMs significantly. Some recent works have introduced resampler or abstractor to reduce the number of resulting visual tokens. Unfortunately, they fail to capture finer details and undermine the visual reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. In this work, we propose a novel visual projector, which adopts a coarse-to-fine scheme to inject the enriched characteristics to generate the condensed visual tokens. In specific, we first interpolate the visual features as a low-resolution point query, providing the overall visual representation as the foundation. Then, we introduce a region-to-point injection module that utilizes high-resolution, multi-level region-based cues as fine-grained reference keys and values, allowing them to be fully absorbed within the corresponding local context region. This step effectively updates the coarse point query, transforming it into an enriched one for the subsequent LLM reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach compresses the visual tokens by 75%~89%, while achieves comparable or even better performance across diverse benchmarks with significantly higher efficiency. The source codes can be found at https://github.com/CircleRadon/TokenPacker.