PVC: Progressive Visual Token Compression for Unified Image and Video Processing in Large Vision-Language Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces PVC, a unified token compression method for large vision-language models that efficiently processes both images and videos by progressively encoding and adaptively compressing visual tokens, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel unified token compression strategy called PVC that handles images and videos simultaneously, enhancing model versatility and efficiency.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on various video benchmarks.

Maintains high performance on image benchmarks, especially in detail-sensitive tasks.

Efficiently compresses visual tokens with limited tokens per frame.

Abstract

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been extended to understand both images and videos. Visual token compression is leveraged to reduce the considerable token length of visual inputs. To meet the needs of different tasks, existing high-performance models usually process images and videos separately with different token compression strategies, limiting the capabilities of combining images and videos. To this end, we extend each image into a "static" video and introduce a unified token compression strategy called Progressive Visual Token Compression (PVC), where the tokens of each frame are progressively encoded and adaptively compressed to supplement the information not extracted from previous frames. Video tokens are efficiently compressed with exploiting the inherent temporal redundancy. Images are repeated as static videos, and the spatial details can be gradually supplemented in multiple frames. PVC unifies the token compressing of images and videos. With a limited number of tokens per frame (64 tokens by default), spatial details and temporal changes can still be preserved. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across various video understanding benchmarks, including long video tasks and fine-grained short video tasks. Meanwhile, our unified token compression strategy incurs no performance loss on image benchmarks, particularly in detail-sensitive tasks.