Title: Enhancing Visual Token Representations for Video Large Language Models via Training-free Spatial-Temporal Pooling and Gridding
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Visual Token Representation, Video Understanding, Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract: Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced video understanding tasks, yet challenges remain in efficiently compressing visual tokens while preserving spatiotemporal interactions. Existing methods, such as LLaVA family, utilize simplistic pooling or interpolation techniques that overlook the intricate dynamics of visual tokens. To bridge this gap, we propose ST-GridPool, a novel training-free visual token enhancement method designed specifically for Video LLMs. Our approach integrates Pyramid Temporal Gridding (PTG), which captures multi-grained spatiotemporal interactions through hierarchical temporal gridding, and Norm-based Spatial Pooling (NSP), which preserves high-information visual regions by leveraging the correlation between token norms and semantic richness. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that ST-GridPool consistently enhances performance of Video LLMs without requiring costly retraining. 
Our method offers an efficient and plug-and-play solution for improving visual token representations.
Our code is available in [https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ST-GridPool-85BE](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ST-GridPool-85BE).

TL;DR: Our training-free method, ST-GridPool, boosts Video LLM performance and efficiency by intelligently compressing visual tokens based on their spatiotemporal importance.