Processing long visual token sequences poses a significant computational burden on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). While token pruning offers a path to acceleration, we find that current methods, while adequate for general understanding, catastrophically fail on fine-grained localization tasks. We attribute this failure to the inherent flaws of the two prevailing strategies: importance-based methods suffer from a strong positional bias, an inherent model artifact that distracts from semantic content, while diversity-based methods exhibit structural blindness, disregarding the user's prompt and spatial redundancy. To address this, we introduce D²Pruner, a framework that rectifies these issues by uniquely combining debiased importance with a structural pruning mechanism. Our method first secures a core set of the most critical tokens as pivots based on a debiased attention score. It then performs a Maximal Independent Set (MIS) selection on the remaining tokens, which are modeled on a hybrid graph where edges signify spatial proximity and semantic similarity. This process iteratively preserves the most important and available token while removing its neighbors, ensuring that the supplementary tokens are chosen to maximize importance and diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D²Pruner achieves exceptional efficiency and fidelity.

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become the dominant methods in image and video generation yet still suffer substantial computational costs. As an effective approach for DiT acceleration, feature caching methods are designed to cache the features of DiT in previous timesteps and reuse them in the next timesteps, allowing us to skip the computation in the next timesteps. Among them, token-wise feature caching has been introduced to perform different caching ratios for different tokens in DiTs, aiming to skip the computation for unimportant tokens while still computing the important ones. In this paper, we propose to carefully check the effectiveness in token-wise feature caching with the following two questions: 1) Is it really necessary to compute the so-called "important" tokens in each step? 2) Are so-called important tokens really important? Surprisingly, this paper gives some counter-intuition answers, demonstrating that consistently computing the selected "important tokens" in all steps is not necessary. The selection of the so-called "important tokens" is often ineffective, and even sometimes shows inferior performance than random selection. Based on these observations, this paper introduces dual feature caching referred to as DuCa, which performs aggressive caching strategy and conservative caching strategy iteratively and selects the tokens for computing randomly. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in DiT, PixArt, FLUX, and OpenSora, demonstrating significant improvements than the previous token-wise feature caching.

The excellent performance of diffusion models in image generation is always accompanied by overlarge computation costs, which have prevented the application of diffusion models in edge devices and interactive applications. Previous works mainly focus on using fewer sampling steps and compressing the denoising network of diffusion models, while this paper proposes to accelerate diffusion models by introducing SiTo, a similarity-based token pruning method that adaptive prunes the redundant tokens in the input data. SiTo is designed to maximize the similarity between model prediction with and without token pruning by using cheap and hardware-friendly operations, leading to significant acceleration ratios without performance drop, and even sometimes improvements in the generation quality. For instance, the zero-shot evaluation shows SiTo leads to 1.90x and 1.75x acceleration on COCO30K and ImageNet with 1.33 and 1.15 FID reduction at the same time. Besides, SiTo has no training requirements and does not require any calibration data, making it plug-and-play in real-world applications.