ForestPrune: High-ratio Visual Token Compression for Video Multimodal Large Language Models via Spatial-Temporal Forest Modeling

Due to the great saving of computation and memory overhead, token compression has become a research hot-spot for MLLMs and achieved remarkable progress in image-language tasks. However, for the video, existing methods still fall short of high-ratio token compression. We attribute this shortcoming to the insufficient modeling of temporal and continual video content, and propose a novel and training-free token pruning method for video MLLMs, termed ForestPrune, which achieves effective and high-ratio pruning via Spatial-temporal Forest Modeling. In practice, ForestPrune construct token forests across video frames based on the semantic, spatial and temporal constraints, making an overall comprehension of videos. Afterwards, ForestPrune evaluates the importance of token trees and nodes based on tree depth and node roles, thereby obtaining a globally optimal pruning decision. To validate ForestPrune, we apply it to two representative video MLLMs, namely LLaVA-Video and LLaVA-OneVision, and conduct extensive experiments on a bunch of video benchmarks. The experimental results not only show the great effectiveness for video MLLMs, e.g., retaining 95.8% average accuracy while reducing 90% tokens for LLaVA-OneVision, but also show its superior performance and efficiency than the compared token compression methods, e.g., +10.1% accuracy on MLVU and -81.4% pruning time than FrameFusion on LLaVA-Video.

Towards Effective and Efficient Long Video Understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models via One-shot Clip Retrieval

Due to excessive memory overhead, most Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can only process videos of limited frames. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient paradigm to remedy this shortcoming, termed One-shot video-Clip based Retrieval AuGmentation (OneClip-RAG). Compared with existing video RAG methods, OneClip-RAG makes full use of the merits of video clips for augmented video understanding in terms of both knowledge integrity and semantic coherence. Besides, it is also equipped with a novel query-guided video chunking algorithm that can unify clip chunking and cross-modal retrieval in one processing step, avoiding redundant computations. To improve instruction following, we further propose a new dataset called SynLongVideo and design a progressive training regime for OneClip-RAG. OneClip-RAG is plugged into five recent MLLMs and validated on a set of long-video benchmarks. Experimental results not only show the obvious performance gains by OneClip-RAG over MLLMs, e.g., boosting InternLV2 8B and Qwen2-VL 7B to the level of GPT-4o on MLVU, but also show its superior efficiency in handling long videos. e.g., enabling LLaVA-Video understand up to an hour of videos in less than 2.2 minutes on a single 4090 GPU.