ReGATE: Learning Faster and Better with Fewer Tokens in MLLMs
Chaoyu Li Arizona State University, Yogesh Kulkarni Arizona State University, Pooyan Fazli Arizona State University
The computational cost of training multimodal large language models (MLLMs) grows rapidly with the number of processed tokens. Existing efficiency methods mainly target inference via token reduction or merging, offering limited benefits during training. We introduce ReGATE (Reference-Guided Adaptive Token Elision), an adaptive token pruning method for accelerating MLLM training. ReGATE adopts a teacher-student framework, in which a frozen teacher LLM provides per-token guidance losses that are fused with an exponential moving average of the student’s difficulty estimates. This adaptive scoring mechanism dynamically selects informative tokens while skipping redundant ones in the forward pass, substantially reducing computation without altering the model architecture. Across three representative MLLMs, ReGATE matches the peak accuracy of standard training on MVBench up to 2 \times faster, using only 38% of the tokens. With extended training, it even surpasses the baseline across multiple multimodal benchmarks, cutting total token usage by over 41%. Code and models will be released publicly.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表