Abstract:Visual token pruning methods effectively mitigate the quadratic computational growth caused by processing high-resolution images and video frames in vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing approaches rely on predefined pruning configurations without determining whether they achieve computation-performance optimality. In this work, we introduce , a novel framework that formulates visual token pruning as a Pareto configuration optimization problem to automatically identify optimal configurations. Our approach employs continuous relaxation and straight-through estimators to enable gradient-based search, solved via the Augmented Lagrangian method. Extensive experiments across 8 visual benchmarks demonstrate that effectively approximates the empirical Pareto frontier obtained through grid search and generalizes well across various pruning methods and VLM architectures. Furthermore, through learnable kernel functions, we investigate layer-wise pruning patterns and reveal that multi-step progressive pruning captures VLMs' hierarchical compression structure, achieving superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs compared to single-layer approaches.
Abstract:With the development of data-centric AI, the focus has shifted from model-driven approaches to improving data quality. Academic literature, as one of the crucial types, is predominantly stored in PDF formats and needs to be parsed into texts before further processing. However, parsing diverse structured texts in academic literature remains challenging due to the lack of datasets that cover various text structures. In this paper, we introduce AceParse, the first comprehensive dataset designed to support the parsing of a wide range of structured texts, including formulas, tables, lists, algorithms, and sentences with embedded mathematical expressions. Based on AceParse, we fine-tuned a multimodal model, named AceParser, which accurately parses various structured texts within academic literature. This model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by 4.1% in terms of F1 score and by 5% in Jaccard Similarity, demonstrating the potential of multimodal models in academic literature parsing. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/JHW5981/AceParse.