2026

Visual instruction tuning adapts pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to follow human instructions for real-world applications. However, rapidly growing instruction datasets introduce substantial redundancy and computational costs. Existing data selection methods aim to prune this redundancy, but predominantly rely on computationally demanding proxy-based inference or training-based metrics, often exacerbating the efficiency bottlenecks they are intended to resolve. To address this challenge, we identify a critical yet overlooked factor: anisotropy in visual feature distributions. We find that this anisotropy induces a Global Semantic Drift that distorts similarity estimates and limits efficient data selection. Motivated by this insight, we devise PRISM, a training-free framework for efficient visual instruction selection. PRISM mitigates the dominant global drift through implicit re-centering, allowing intrinsic visual semantics to provide a reliable redundancy signal without proxy models or additional training. Empirically, PRISM reduces end-to-end GPU time by about 70% while simultaneously enhancing performance, surpassing models fine-tuned on the full dataset across multimodal and language understanding benchmarks and reaching 101.7% relative performance against the full-data baseline.