DocKylin: A Large Multimodal Model for Visual Document Understanding with Efficient Visual Slimming

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face significant challenges in visual document understanding (VDU) tasks due to the high resolution, dense text, and complex layouts typical of document images. These characteristics demand a high level of detail perception ability from MLLMs. While increasing input resolution improves detail perception, it also leads to longer sequences of visual tokens, increasing computational costs and straining the models' ability to handle long contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce DocKylin, a document-centric MLLM that performs visual content slimming at both the pixel and token levels, thereby reducing token sequence length in VDU scenarios. DocKylin utilizes an Adaptive Pixel Slimming (APS) preprocessing module to perform pixel-level slimming, increasing the proportion of informative pixels. Moreover, DocKylin incorporates a novel Dynamic Token Slimming (DTS) module to conduct token-level slimming, filtering essential tokens and removing others to create a compressed, adaptive visual sequence. Experiments demonstrate DocKylin's promising performance across various VDU benchmarks. Notably, both the proposed APS and DTS are parameter-free, facilitating easy integration into existing MLLMs, and our experiments indicate their potential for broader applications.