Global Compression Commander: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for High-Resolution Large Vision-Language Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces GlobalCom2, a plug-and-play token compression framework for high-resolution vision-language models that uses global thumbnails to guide efficient local crop processing, significantly reducing computation while maintaining performance.

Contribution

It proposes a novel global compression framework leveraging thumbnails to guide token compression in high-resolution LVLMs, addressing multi-view and dynamic cropping challenges.

Findings

Maintains over 90% performance with 90% token compression.

Reduces FLOPs to 9.1% and peak memory to 60%.

Demonstrates effectiveness on high-resolution multi-view models.

Abstract

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) excel at visual understanding, but face efficiency challenges due to quadratic complexity in processing long multi-modal contexts. While token compression can reduce computational costs, existing approaches are designed for single-view LVLMs and fail to consider the unique multi-view characteristics of high-resolution LVLMs with dynamic cropping. Existing methods treat all tokens uniformly, but our analysis reveals that global thumbnails can naturally guide the compression of local crops by providing holistic context for informativeness evaluation. In this paper, we first analyze dynamic cropping strategy, revealing both the complementary nature between thumbnails and crops, and the distinctive characteristics across different crops. Based on our observations, we propose ``Global Compression Commander'' (\textit{i.e.}, \textbf{GlobalCom$^2$}), a novel plug-and-play token compression framework for HR-LVLMs. GlobalCom$^2$ leverages thumbnail as the ``commander'' to guide the compression of local crops, adaptively preserving informative details while eliminating redundancy. Extensive experiments show that GlobalCom$^2$ maintains over \textbf{90\%} performance while compressing \textbf{90\%} visual tokens, reducing FLOPs and peak memory to \textbf{9.1\%} and \textbf{60\%}.