RI-Prune: Relation and Information Aware Visual Token Pruning for Multi-Image Vision-Language Models

Abstract

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently been extended to handle multiple input images, but this extension dramatically increases the visual token budget, making visual-token pruning not merely an efficiency option but a practical necessity. Existing visual-token pruning methods, primarily designed for the single-image setting, rely on attention-derived saliency signals to estimate per-token importance. However, this attention-centric design transfers poorly to the multi-image regime: it causes substantial performance degradation on multi-image benchmarks, suffers from strong positional bias, and loses discriminative attention signals as the number of input images increases. To test whether attention-selected tokens are truly important for multi-image reasoning, we conduct two complementary causal probes—Leave-One-In and Leave-One-Deletion—which measure token importance by restoring individual tokens to a zeroed visual sequence or removing them from the full sequence. Attention-based pruners provide only marginal gains over random selection, showing that attention is a weak proxy for visual-token importance in multi-image reasoning. Motivated by this gap, we propose Relation and Information Aware Pruning (RI-Prune), a training-free, attention-free pre-decoder selector for multi-image visual token pruning. RI-Prune scores each visual token using a z-normalized combination of three signals computed from projector outputs: query relevance, cross-image correspondence with compact per-image prototypes, and intra-image representativeness. By integrating these signals, RI-Prune performs balanced per-image Top-K selection to preserve information across input images. Across multiple multi-image benchmarks and three LVLM backbones, RI-Prune achieves a stronger trade-off between token reduction and task performance than prior pruning methods, particularly under aggressive token budgets.