Calibrating Attention-Based Token Pruning for Efficient Multi-Image Synthesis in UMMs

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) enable powerful multi-image synthesis but incur substantial computation from long visual contexts. While token pruning offers a direct route to accelerating inference, existing methods are primarily adapted from understanding tasks, suffering from insufficient reference image exploration, confused conditional guidance, and pooling-induced ambiguity that degrades generation quality. To address these issues, we propose CATP, the first training-free context-compression method tailored to UMM generation, which \textbf{C}alibrates the discrepancies of general \textbf{A}ttention-based \textbf{T}oken \textbf{P}runing for better quality-efficiency trade-off. Concretely, building on independent layer-wise pruning during denoising, we introduce Guidance-Consistent Pruning (GCP) to synchronize pruning decisions across conditioning branches, and a Taylor-Calibrated Attention Metric (TCAM) that derives a theoretically grounded second-order correction for pooling-induced bias. In addition, a Fast Scoring Operator (FSO) fuses the calibration into tiled online Softmax to reduce pruning cost. Extensive experiments across representative UMMs and benchmarks demonstrate that CATP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art token-reduction methods, achieving up to 2.09$\times$ attention-core speedup.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-10-29
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.39467
Primary Topic
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Type
preprint
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preprint

Calibrating Attention-Based Token Pruning for Efficient Multi-Image Synthesis in UMMs

Qijian Tian, Changqian Yu, Penghui Du, Jiaxin Chen et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
preprint

Calibrating Attention-Based Token Pruning for Efficient Multi-Image Synthesis in UMMs

Qijian Tian, Changqian Yu, Penghui Du, Jiaxin Chen, Zimeng Wu, Yunhong Wang
preprint en

Abstract

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) enable powerful multi-image synthesis but incur substantial computation from long visual contexts. While token pruning offers a direct route to accelerating inference, existing methods are primarily adapted from understanding tasks, suffering from insufficient reference image exploration, confused conditional guidance, and pooling-induced ambiguity that degrades generation quality. To address these issues, we propose CATP, the first training-free context-compression method tailored to UMM generation, which \textbf{C}alibrates the discrepancies of general \textbf{A}ttention-based \textbf{T}oken \textbf{P}runing for better quality-efficiency trade-off. Concretely, building on independent layer-wise pruning during denoising, we introduce Guidance-Consistent Pruning (GCP) to synchronize pruning decisions across conditioning branches, and a Taylor-Calibrated Attention Metric (TCAM) that derives a theoretically grounded second-order correction for pooling-induced bias. In addition, a Fast Scoring Operator (FSO) fuses the calibration into tiled online Softmax to reduce pruning cost. Extensive experiments across representative UMMs and benchmarks demonstrate that CATP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art token-reduction methods, achieving up to 2.09$\times$ attention-core speedup.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
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Calibrating Attention-Based Token Pruning for Efficient Multi-Image Synthesis in UMMs — Qijian Tian, Changqian Yu, et al. · arXiv (Cornell University) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS