MedSTP: Preserving Subspace and Transition Evidence for Medical VQA Token Pruning
2610.22751

Authors

Qizhen Lan,Lin Zhao,Liang He,Tianyang Wang,Xiaoqian Jiang

Abstract

Medical vision-language models (VLMs) for visual question answering (VQA) often pass long visual-token sequences to the language model, making visual-token pruning attractive but risky for medical images, where answers may depend on localized boundary and texture evidence. We study training free pre-decoding pruning and treat pruning as a subspace stable evidence preservation problem.

The retained tokens should remain close to the dominant visual evidence subspace induced by the full token set. To this end, we propose Subspace-Transition Token Pruning (\method{}), which estimates each token's spectral support from principal component space and constructs a compact representation subspace. To better reflect medical image structure, \method{} further uses a bounded token-grid transition prior to promote boundary and texture sensitive tokens.

We evaluate \method{} on the closed-ended SLAKE and OmniMedVQA benchmarks and on RadImageNet-VQA, which provides both closed-ended and open-ended evaluations, using Lingshu-7B and Qwen3-VL-8B backbones. \method{} delivers consistently strong performance on both the closed-ended and open-ended RadImageNet-VQA evaluations.

These results show that \method{} is an effective training free pruning framework for medical domain VQA.

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