Token-level Correlation-guided Compression for Efficient Multimodal Document Understanding
Keywords: Multimodal Large Models, Token Compression, High-resolution Image
Abstract: Cropping high-resolution document images into multiple sub-images is the most widely used approach for current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to do document understanding. Most of current document understanding methods preserve all tokens within sub-images and treat them equally. This neglects their different informativeness and leads to a significant increase in the number of image tokens. To perform a more adaptive and efficient document understanding, we propose Token-level Correlation-guided Compression, a parameter-free and plug-and-play methodology to optimize token processing. Firstly, we propose an innovative approach for assessing the pattern repetitiveness based on the correlation between each patch tokens. This method identifies redundant tokens, allowing for the determination of the sub-image's information density. Secondly, we present a token-level sampling method that efficiently captures the most informative tokens by delving into the correlation between the \texttt{[CLS]} token and patch tokens. By integrating these strategies, we develop a plug-and-play Token-level Correlation-guided Compressor module that can be seamlessly incorporated into MLLMs utilizing cropping techniques. This module not only enhances the processing speed during training and inference but also maintains comparable performance. We conduct experiments with the representative document understanding model mPLUG-DocOwl1.5 and the effectiveness is demonstrated through extensive comparisons with other compression methods.
Primary Area: generative models
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Submission Number: 6158
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