# Efficient Token Compression for Vision Transformer with Spatial Information Preserved Source: [Efficient Token Compression for Vision Transformer with Spatial Information Preserved]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T04:24:32.092Z Authors: Junzhu Mao, Yang Shen, Jinyang Guo, Yazhou Yao, Xiansheng Hua Published: 2025-03-30T14:23:18.000Z ## Abstract Token compression is essential for reducing the computational and memory requirements of transformer models, enabling their deployment in resource-constrained environments. In this work, we propose an efficient and hardware-compatible token compression method called Prune and Merge. Our approach integrates token pruning and merging operations within transformer models to achieve layer-wise token compression. By introducing trainable merge and reconstruct matrices and utilizing shortcut connections, we efficiently merge tokens while preserving important information and enabling the restoration of pruned tokens. Additionally, we introduce a novel gradient-weighted attention scoring mechanism that computes token importance scores during the training phase, eliminating the need for separate computations during inference and enhancing compression efficiency. We also leverage gradient information to capture the global impact of tokens and automatically identify optimal compression structures. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet-1k and ADE20K datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving significant speed-ups with minimal accuracy degradation compared to state-of-the-art methods. For instance, on DeiT-Small, we achieve a 1.64$\\times$ speed-up with only a 0.2\\% drop in accuracy on ImageNet-1k. Moreover, by compressing segmenter models and comparing with existing methods, we demonstrate the superior performance of our approach in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Code and models have been made available at https://github.com/NUST-Machine-Intelligence-Laboratory/prune\_and\_merge. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()