DynaTok: Temporally Adaptive and Positional Bias-Aware Token Compression for Video-LLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19322v1
• Date: Tue, 19 May 2026 04:02:01 GMT
• Title: DynaTok: Temporally Adaptive and Positional Bias-Aware Token Compression for Video-LLMs
• Abstract summary: DynaTok is a training-free, temporally adaptive and bias-aware token compression framework.<n>It allocates token budgets across both temporal and spatial dimensions.<n>It retains over 95% of baseline accuracy even with a 90% token reduction.
• Score: 2.6035240359441274
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have greatly expanded multimodal reasoning capabilities. However, the massive number of visual tokens extracted from long video sequences incurs prohibitive computational costs, limiting their deployment in real-world scenarios. Existing training-free token compression methods select tokens based on attention magnitude as a proxy for semantic importance, but often overlook positional bias and rely only on short-term temporal locality, leading to redundant spatio-temporal coverage and inefficient token usage. We present DynaTok, a training-free, temporally adaptive and bias-aware token compression framework that allocates token budgets across both temporal and spatial dimensions. Through a lightweight exponential moving average (EMA) memory, the Temporal Budget Allocation (TBA) module dynamically assigns fewer tokens to redundant frames and more to novel frames, capturing long-term temporal variation. The Spatial Budget Allocation (SBA) module complements this by selecting spatially diverse and semantically important features using activation-based attention maps, while leveraging a spatial memory to reduce redundancy from previously selected regions and mitigate positional bias. DynaTok integrates seamlessly with existing Video-LLMs such as LLaVA-OneVision and LLaVA-Video without retraining, and effectively preserves semantic coverage under aggressive compression. Experiments on four representative VideoQA benchmarks-MVBench, LongVideoBench, MLVU, and VideoMME-show that DynaTok retains over 95% of baseline accuracy even with a 90% token reduction, surpassing recent training-free approaches. These results demonstrate that DynaTok provides a principled foundation for efficient and robust video reasoning, paving the way toward real-time streaming video understanding with future Video-LLMs.

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