new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Sep 11

Stochastic KV Routing: Enabling Adaptive Depth-Wise Cache Sharing

Serving transformer language models with high throughput requires caching Key-Values (KVs) to avoid redundant computation during autoregressive generation. The memory footprint of KV caching is significant and heavily impacts serving costs. This work proposes to lessen these memory requirements. While recent work has largely addressed KV cache reduction via compression and eviction along the temporal axis, we argue that the depth dimension offers an orthogonal and robust avenue for optimization. Although prior research suggests that a full cache for every layer is redundant, implementing cross-layer cache sharing remains a practical challenge; existing methods typically suffer from reduced throughput or increased time-to-first-token. In this paper, we demonstrate that dropping a layer's cache offers efficient optimization without information loss. We propose a simple training approach: random cross-layer attention. During training, layers randomly choose to attend either to their own KV states or those of a preceding layer. This stochastic process adapts the model to be robust to various depth-wise cache sharing strategies, ensuring flexibility for unknown hardware constraints at deployment time. Our evaluations show that applying this scheme during pre-training or fine-tuning enables depth-wise cache sharing for various model families. Furthermore, for larger models in data-constrained settings, this approach is suggestive of a regularization-like effect, frequently preserving or improving performance while significantly reducing the cache's memory footprint.

apple Apple
·
Apr 2 1

Learning Temporally Consistent Video Depth from Video Diffusion Priors

This work addresses the challenge of video depth estimation, which expects not only per-frame accuracy but, more importantly, cross-frame consistency. Instead of directly developing a depth estimator from scratch, we reformulate the prediction task into a conditional generation problem. This allows us to leverage the prior knowledge embedded in existing video generation models, thereby reducing learn- ing difficulty and enhancing generalizability. Concretely, we study how to tame the public Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) to predict reliable depth from input videos using a mixture of image depth and video depth datasets. We empirically confirm that a procedural training strategy - first optimizing the spatial layers of SVD and then optimizing the temporal layers while keeping the spatial layers frozen - yields the best results in terms of both spatial accuracy and temporal consistency. We further examine the sliding window strategy for inference on arbitrarily long videos. Our observations indicate a trade-off between efficiency and performance, with a one-frame overlap already producing favorable results. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach, termed ChronoDepth, over existing alternatives, particularly in terms of the temporal consistency of the estimated depth. Additionally, we highlight the benefits of more consistent video depth in two practical applications: depth-conditioned video generation and novel view synthesis. Our project page is available at https://jhaoshao.github.io/ChronoDepth/{this http URL}.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 3, 2024 2

WindowKV: Task-Adaptive Group-Wise KV Cache Window Selection for Efficient LLM Inference

With the advancements in long-context inference capabilities of large language models (LLMs), the KV cache has become one of the foundational components. However, its substantial GPU memory consumption makes KV cache compression a key technique for enabling efficient LLM inference in industrial scenarios. While recent studies have focused on optimizing the memory occupied by the KV cache, they overlook two critical factors: preserving semantic coherence and considering task-specific characteristic during compression. To address these limitations, we propose a novel task-adaptive KV cache window selection method, WindowKV. WindowKV dynamically selects local semantic windows consisting of consecutive tokens, according to task-specific characteristics, ensuring the retained KV cache captures continuous, essential context. Additionally, we introduce an intra-group layer KV cache indices sharing strategy to reduce computational overhead, achieving a balance between performance and efficiency. We rigorously evaluate WindowKV on the LongBench benchmark, and the results demonstrate that it maintains a performance comparable to full KV cache retention while using only 12% of the original KV cache, significantly reducing memory requirements. Furthermore, our method also achieves state-of-the-art results in the Needle-in-a-Haystack evaluation, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 22, 2025

Tensor Cache: Eviction-conditioned Associative Memory for Transformers

Autoregressive Transformer KV caches grow linearly with context length; sliding-window caching bounds memory but discards evicted tokens entirely, so relevant evidence outside the window becomes inaccessible. We introduce Tensor Cache, a two-level cache that pairs sliding-window softmax attention as a first-level cache (L1) with a fixed-size outer-product fast-weight memory as a second-level cache (L2) fed by KV pairs evicted from the window. Recent tokens remain in exact local attention; evicted pairs are compressed into a per-layer matrix A and read by future queries through a single matrix multiplication, exploiting the linear-attention identity q_t(k_i otimes v_i)=langle q_t,k_irangle v_i. A learned scalar gate fuses the L1 and L2 outputs, and per-head decay and write-rate parameters are trained end-to-end. The outer-product memory and the read identity are well-known; our contribution is their use as an L2 cache fed exclusively by sliding-window evictions, plus identifying that the common chunked-mean training shortcut A!leftarrow!λA!+!η(bar k!otimes!bar v) silently introduces C^2{-}C spurious cross-token outer products per chunk, and closing the gap with a parallel weighted-sum scan equivalent to per-token writes within float32 epsilon. Across systems scaling, controlled associative recall, long-context language modeling, and memory-capacity diagnostics, Tensor Cache improves the memory--quality frontier over bounded-state baselines.

  • 5 authors
·
May 20

Flow caching for autoregressive video generation

Autoregressive models, often built on Transformer architectures, represent a powerful paradigm for generating ultra-long videos by synthesizing content in sequential chunks. However, this sequential generation process is notoriously slow. While caching strategies have proven effective for accelerating traditional video diffusion models, existing methods assume uniform denoising across all frames-an assumption that breaks down in autoregressive models where different video chunks exhibit varying similarity patterns at identical timesteps. In this paper, we present FlowCache, the first caching framework specifically designed for autoregressive video generation. Our key insight is that each video chunk should maintain independent caching policies, allowing fine-grained control over which chunks require recomputation at each timestep. We introduce a chunkwise caching strategy that dynamically adapts to the unique denoising characteristics of each chunk, complemented by a joint importance-redundancy optimized KV cache compression mechanism that maintains fixed memory bounds while preserving generation quality. Our method achieves remarkable speedups of 2.38 times on MAGI-1 and 6.7 times on SkyReels-V2, with negligible quality degradation (VBench: 0.87 increase and 0.79 decrease respectively). These results demonstrate that FlowCache successfully unlocks the potential of autoregressive models for real-time, ultra-long video generation-establishing a new benchmark for efficient video synthesis at scale. The code is available at https://github.com/mikeallen39/FlowCache.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 10

ERTACache: Error Rectification and Timesteps Adjustment for Efficient Diffusion

Diffusion models suffer from substantial computational overhead due to their inherently iterative inference process. While feature caching offers a promising acceleration strategy by reusing intermediate outputs across timesteps, naive reuse often incurs noticeable quality degradation. In this work, we formally analyze the cumulative error introduced by caching and decompose it into two principal components: feature shift error, caused by inaccuracies in cached outputs, and step amplification error, which arises from error propagation under fixed timestep schedules. To address these issues, we propose ERTACache, a principled caching framework that jointly rectifies both error types. Our method employs an offline residual profiling stage to identify reusable steps, dynamically adjusts integration intervals via a trajectory-aware correction coefficient, and analytically approximates cache-induced errors through a closed-form residual linearization model. Together, these components enable accurate and efficient sampling under aggressive cache reuse. Extensive experiments across standard image and video generation benchmarks show that ERTACache achieves up to 2x inference speedup while consistently preserving or even improving visual quality. Notably, on the state-of-the-art Wan2.1 video diffusion model, ERTACache delivers 2x acceleration with minimal VBench degradation, effectively maintaining baseline fidelity while significantly improving efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/ERTACache.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 27, 2025

Model Reveals What to Cache: Profiling-Based Feature Reuse for Video Diffusion Models

Recent advances in diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in video generation. However, the computational intensity remains a significant challenge for practical applications. While feature caching has been proposed to reduce the computational burden of diffusion models, existing methods typically overlook the heterogeneous significance of individual blocks, resulting in suboptimal reuse and degraded output quality. To this end, we address this gap by introducing ProfilingDiT, a novel adaptive caching strategy that explicitly disentangles foreground and background-focused blocks. Through a systematic analysis of attention distributions in diffusion models, we reveal a key observation: 1) Most layers exhibit a consistent preference for either foreground or background regions. 2) Predicted noise shows low inter-step similarity initially, which stabilizes as denoising progresses. This finding inspires us to formulate a selective caching strategy that preserves full computation for dynamic foreground elements while efficiently caching static background features. Our approach substantially reduces computational overhead while preserving visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves significant acceleration (e.g., 2.01 times speedup for Wan2.1) while maintaining visual fidelity across comprehensive quality metrics, establishing a viable method for efficient video generation.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 3, 2025

GUI-KV: Efficient GUI Agents via KV Cache with Spatio-Temporal Awareness

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents built on vision-language models have emerged as a promising approach to automate human-computer workflows. However, they also face the inefficiency challenge as they process long sequences of high-resolution screenshots and solving long-horizon tasks, making inference slow, costly and memory-bound. While key-value (KV) caching can mitigate this, storing the full cache is prohibitive for image-heavy contexts. Existing cache-compression methods are sub-optimal as they do not account for the spatial and temporal redundancy of GUIs. In this work, we first analyze attention patterns in GUI agent workloads and find that, unlike in natural images, attention sparsity is uniformly high across all transformer layers. This insight motivates a simple uniform budget allocation strategy, which we show empirically outperforms more complex layer-varying schemes. Building on this, we introduce GUI-KV, a plug-and-play KV cache compression method for GUI agents that requires no retraining. GUI-KV combines two novel techniques: (i) spatial saliency guidance, which augments attention scores with the L2 norm of hidden states to better preserve semantically important visual tokens, and (ii) temporal redundancy scoring, which projects previous frames' keys onto the current frame's key subspace to preferentially prune redundant history. Across standard GUI agent benchmarks and models, GUI-KV outperforms competitive KV compression baselines, closely matching full-cache accuracy at modest budgets. Notably, in a 5-screenshot setting on the AgentNetBench benchmark, GUI-KV reduces decoding FLOPs by 38.9% while increasing step accuracy by 4.1% over the full-cache baseline. These results demonstrate that exploiting GUI-specific redundancies enables efficient and reliable agent performance.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025 2

Kamera: Unified Position-Invariant Multimodal KV Cache for Training-Free Reuse

Multimodal agents repeatedly re-examine the same video frames, UI screenshots, and rendered artifacts as their context window slides and reasoning iterates, yet every look-back re-encodes from scratch, because prefix caches serve reuse only at a fixed leading position. We show this recompute is avoidable, and identify exactly what naive KV reuse loses: the cross-chunk conditioning a chunk absorbs from its neighbours. This loss is asymmetric. The direct readout of a cached chunk is recovered exactly and for free by the standard state-merge. What remains is a diffuse, low-rank residue concentrated in deep layers, invisible to single-hop retrieval but precisely what multi-hop reasoning binds on. Blind reuse therefore leaves single-hop recall intact while halving multi-hop accuracy; this is the failure mode prior position-independent caches, designed for single-context or single-image reuse, do not address. We repair it with a small, training-free low-rank conditioning patch stored alongside each position-free chunk. Reuse reduces to one operator across MLA, GQA, and MHA: exact RoPE re-rotation to any target position, plus the patch that restores cross-chunk binding. This makes three window operations cheap: reorder (one patch serves every ordering of a cached set), sliding-window survival (surviving chunks relocate via rotation only, zero re-encode), and recall (an evicted chunk is rehydrated by its patch, never re-encoded). A rank-m patch recovers full task accuracy on cross-chunk-binding benchmarks, MM-NIAH across two attention families and two-page doc-QA, at a fraction of the KV footprint, and reconstructs re-prefill KV to within bf16 rounding in a production SGLang kernel across six backbones. The conditioning signal is strongest in redundant vision and video streams, making our solution most impactful where multimodal agents spend their recompute budget.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 21

When Classic Cache Policies Fail: Learning-Augmented Replacement for Semantic Retrieval Buffers

LLM agents increasingly rely on retrieval buffers to store and reuse past experience, yet the cache management policies governing these buffers remain largely ad-hoc. We formalize this as an online semantic cache replacement problem with switching costs, where items are matched by embedding similarity and hit quality is continuous rather than binary. Through experiments on two datasets from MemoryBench-Full (LoCoMo, DialSim) with 8 replacement policies, we reveal a surprising finding: classic heuristics (LRU, LFU) consistently underperform the naive FIFO baseline on semantic workloads, due to the absence of temporal locality and frequency concentration. We propose SOLAR, a learning-augmented framework that derives modification timing from regret accumulation (achieving sim17\% modification rate) and content selection from Bayesian online learning over implicit retrieval feedback. We prove SOLAR achieves a constant competitive ratio leq 3, independent of cache size and horizon (vs.\ Ω(K) for FIFO), and eviction regret O(KTlog T), matching the Ω(KT) lower bound up to logarithmic factors. Experiments demonstrate 5--75\% relative improvement over FIFO at tight cache sizes, with a clearly characterized phase transition at the working set boundary. Synthetic experiments with 5000-item pools further reveal an inverted-U relationship between pool size and retrieval quality, justifying capacity constraints as a retrieval noise phenomenon rather than a storage limitation.

tencent Tencent
·
Jun 30 2

InfiniteVL: Synergizing Linear and Sparse Attention for Highly-Efficient, Unlimited-Input Vision-Language Models

Window attention and linear attention represent two principal strategies for mitigating the quadratic complexity and ever-growing KV cache in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, we observe that window-based VLMs suffer performance degradation when sequence length exceeds the window size, while linear attention underperforms on information-intensive tasks such as OCR and document understanding. To overcome these limitations, we propose InfiniteVL, a linear-complexity VLM architecture that synergizes sliding window attention (SWA) with Gated DeltaNet. For achieving competitive multimodal performance under constrained resources, we design a three-stage training strategy comprising distillation pretraining, instruction tuning, and long-sequence SFT. Remarkably, using less than 2\% of the training data required by leading VLMs, InfiniteVL not only substantially outperforms previous linear-complexity VLMs but also matches the performance of leading Transformer-based VLMs, while demonstrating effective long-term memory retention. Compared to similar-sized Transformer-based VLMs accelerated by FlashAttention-2, InfiniteVL achieves over 3.6\times inference speedup while maintaining constant latency and memory footprint. In streaming video understanding scenarios, it sustains a stable 24 FPS real-time prefill speed while preserving long-term memory cache. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/InfiniteVL.

hustvl HUST Vision Lab
·
Dec 9, 2025 3

Category-Aware Semantic Caching for Heterogeneous LLM Workloads

LLM serving systems process heterogeneous query workloads where different categories exhibit different characteristics. Code queries cluster densely in embedding space while conversational queries distribute sparsely. Content staleness varies from minutes (stock data) to months (code patterns). Query repetition patterns range from power-law (code) to uniform (conversation), producing long tail cache hit rate distributions: high-repetition categories achieve 40-60% hit rates while low-repetition or volatile categories achieve 5-15% hit rates. Vector databases must exclude the long tail because remote search costs (30ms) require 15--20% hit rates to break even, leaving 20-30% of production traffic uncached. Uniform cache policies compound this problem: fixed thresholds cause false positives in dense spaces and miss valid paraphrases in sparse spaces; fixed TTLs waste memory or serve stale data. This paper presents category-aware semantic caching where similarity thresholds, TTLs, and quotas vary by query category. We present a hybrid architecture separating in-memory HNSW search from external document storage, reducing miss cost from 30ms to 2ms. This reduction makes low-hit-rate categories economically viable (break-even at 3-5% versus 15-20%), enabling cache coverage across the entire workload distribution. Adaptive load-based policies extend this framework to respond to downstream model load, dynamically adjusting thresholds and TTLs to reduce traffic to overloaded models by 9-17% in theoretical projections.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 29, 2025

A Three-Layer Caching Architecture for Low-Latency LLM Web Search on Commodity CPU Hardware

AI-powered search products such as ChatGPT search, Google's AI Overviews, and Perplexity provide LLM-synthesized answers grounded in live web results. We developed OreoLook (formerly lixSearch), an open-source answer engine using automated browser agents and provider-routed LLM inference. Its local search, caching, session-management, and embedding stack runs on commodity CPU hardware; answer synthesis is performed by a remote inference provider. As usage grew, sessions lost context, equivalent queries triggered redundant work, and URLs were repeatedly embedded across sessions. We present a three-layer caching architecture: (1) a Session Context Window maintaining a rolling window of recent messages in Redis with automatic overflow to Huffman-compressed disk archives; (2) a Semantic Query Cache catches rephrasings via cosine similarity on embedding vectors, eliminating redundant LLM invocations; and (3) a URL Embedding Cache that deduplicates embedding computations across sessions. Deployed on a single 8-vCPU Intel Cascade Lake server (2 GHz, 32 GB RAM) running 30 Hypercorn worker processes across three containerized replicas, the evaluated system reported an 89.3% aggregate Redis keyspace hit rate with 0.1 ms read latency and just 1.38 MB of memory overhead. A background LRU eviction daemon migrates idle sessions from Redis to disk and re-hydrates them on demand, enabling conversations that can be resumed hours or days later under the configured retention policy.

pollinations Pollinations
·
Aug 11 2

ReCache: Learning Budget-Aware Caching Schedules for Diffusion Models via REINFORCE

Modern diffusion models generate high-quality images and videos, but their iterative denoising process makes inference expensive. Feature caching accelerates sampling by reusing or predicting intermediate activations across neighboring denoising steps, exploiting the redundancy of computations along the reverse trajectory. In this work, we focus on the caching schedule: selecting which denoising steps should be fully recomputed. Existing schedules are either fixed (e.g. uniform) or chosen adaptively from per-step error heuristics; in both cases, the actual compute cost is a side-effect of hand-tuned thresholds rather than a quantity the user can specify. We propose ReCache, which inverts this: given a target budget k, it learns the recomputation schedule that maximizes generation quality, turning compute into a directly controllable input. ReCache trains via policy gradients, sidestepping backpropagation through full diffusion inference, and uses no labelled data. Generations from uncached inference serve as matching targets, paired with a reward for generation quality. ReCache is compatible with any caching mechanism, including feature reuse and feature forecasting; for each mechanism, a single trained policy adapts across computational budgets at inference time. ReCache consistently outperforms scheduling baselines: under a times5.04 FLOPs reduction on FLUX, it reduces LPIPS by 31% (from 0.456 to 0.316) compared to DiCache; on Wan 2.1 at a sim times2.6 speedup, it drops LPIPS by 65% (from 0.480 to 0.169) and boosts the VBench score by 7% (5.6 points, from 70.4 to 76.0) over uniform HiCache. Code is available at https://github.com/thecrazymage/ReCache.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 3

Efficient Long-Horizon GUI Agents via Training-Free KV Cache Compression

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as powerful engines for autonomous GUI agents, yet their deployment is severely constrained by the substantial memory footprint and latency of the Key-Value (KV) cache during long-horizon interactions. While existing cache compression methods have proven effective for LLMs, we empirically demonstrate that they suffer from suboptimal performance in GUI scenarios due to a fundamental misalignment: unlike general visual tasks where attention sparsity varies across layers, GUI attention patterns exhibit uniform high-sparsity across all transformer layers. Motivated by this insight, we propose ST-Lite, a training-free KV cache compression framework tailored for efficient GUI agents that explicitly addresses the dynamic spatio-trajectory dependencies within GUI data streams. ST-Lite introduces a novel dual-branch scoring policy incorporating Component-centric Spatial Saliency (CSS) and Trajectory-aware Semantic Gating (TSG). Specifically, CSS preserves the structural integrity of interactive UI elements by evaluating local neighborhood saliency, while TSG mitigates historical redundancy by dynamically filtering visually repetitive KV pairs within the interaction trajectory. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that with only a 10-20% cache budget, ST-Lite achieves a 2.45x decoding acceleration while maintaining comparable or even superior performance compared to full-cache baselines, offering a scalable solution for resource-constrained GUI agents.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 26

LayerRecall: A State-Conditioned Memory Router for Long-Horizon Consistency in Video Generation

Autoregressive video diffusion enables scalable long-video generation by producing chunks from a bounded recent context. While recency-based caching preserves local continuity, it evicts historical cues needed when subjects, objects, scenes, or attributes reappear. Existing memory mechanisms expose models to nonlocal history, but access alone does not ensure effective use. Our analysis reveals that video DiT layers exhibit distinct preferences for current, recent, and distant context, suggesting that long-range memory requires deciding both what to retrieve and where to use it. We introduce LayerRecall, a current-conditioned, layer-selective memory router that retrieves relevant historical K/V states and injects them only into backbone-specific memory-sensitive layers while preserving local attention elsewhere. To reduce reliance on scarce high-quality long-horizon videos and explicit memory-allocation labels, we further propose Cross-Horizon Prediction Matching (CHPM), which uses a privileged long-context reference to supervise the bounded-memory router in prediction space. Across 100 multi-shot evaluation prompts, LayerRecall achieves the best overall results on MemoBench and MovieBench while matching its backbone on VBench-Long, demonstrating stronger long-range recovery without sacrificing local continuity. Qualitative analyses further reveal memory-guided self-correction, whereby initially mismatched local attributes return to their historical appearance without resetting ongoing motion or scene structure. Additional analyses show cross-backbone portability and negligible inference overhead.

CAKE: Cascading and Adaptive KV Cache Eviction with Layer Preferences

Large language models (LLMs) excel at processing long sequences, boosting demand for key-value (KV) caching. While recent efforts to evict KV cache have alleviated the inference burden, they often fail to allocate resources rationally across layers with different attention patterns. In this paper, we introduce Cascading and Adaptive KV cache Eviction (CAKE), a novel approach that frames KV cache eviction as a "cake-slicing problem." CAKE assesses layer-specific preferences by considering attention dynamics in both spatial and temporal dimensions, allocates rational cache size for layers accordingly, and manages memory constraints in a cascading manner. This approach enables a global view of cache allocation, adaptively distributing resources across diverse attention mechanisms while maintaining memory budgets. CAKE also employs a new eviction indicator that considers the shifting importance of tokens over time, addressing limitations in existing methods that overlook temporal dynamics. Comprehensive experiments on LongBench and NeedleBench show that CAKE maintains model performance with only 3.2% of the KV cache and consistently outperforms current baselines across various models and memory constraints, particularly in low-memory settings. Additionally, CAKE achieves over 10x speedup in decoding latency compared to full cache when processing contexts of 128K tokens with FlashAttention-2. Our code is available at https://github.com/antgroup/cakekv.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 16, 2025

TetherCache: Stabilizing Autoregressive Long-Form Video Generation with Gated Recall and Trusted Alignment

Autoregressive video diffusion models provide a natural formulation for streaming and variable-length video generation by conditioning newly generated frames on previously generated content. However, extending these models to minute-level generation remains challenging: the limited KV-cache budget prevents the model from retaining the full history, while repeatedly conditioning on self-generated frames induces a context distribution shift that accumulates over time, leading to visual artifacts, quality degradation, and temporal drift. In this paper, we propose TetherCache, a training-free and plug-and-play cache management strategy for drift-resistant long video generation. TetherCache organizes the cache into sink, memory, and recent regions, and introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, GRAB (Gated Recall with Attention-Diversity Balancing) selects long-range memory frames using a gated score that combines attention-based relevance with temporal diversity, preserving informative yet diverse historical context under a fixed cache budget. Second, TAME (Trusted Alignment via Memory Editing) lightly edits newly recalled memory tokens by aligning their statistics to a trusted context distribution, reducing the pollution caused by drifted historical features. Built on Self-Forcing, TetherCache consistently improves long-video generation quality on VBench-Long across 30s, 60s, and 240s settings. In particular, for 240s generation, it substantially improves overall and semantic scores while reducing quality drift from 7.84 to 1.33, demonstrating its effectiveness for stable long-horizon autoregressive video diffusion.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10

Attention Is All You Need for KV Cache in Diffusion LLMs

This work studies how to adaptively recompute key-value (KV) caches for diffusion large language models (DLMs) to maximize prediction accuracy while minimizing decoding latency. Prior methods' decoders recompute QKV for all tokens at every denoising step and layer, despite KV states changing little across most steps, especially in shallow layers, leading to substantial redundancy. We make three observations: (1) distant {bf MASK} tokens primarily act as a length-bias and can be cached block-wise beyond the active prediction window; (2) KV dynamics increase with depth, suggesting that selective refresh starting from deeper layers is sufficient; and (3) the most-attended token exhibits the smallest KV drift, providing a conservative lower bound on cache change for other tokens. Building on these, we propose {bf Elastic-Cache}, a training-free, architecture-agnostic strategy that jointly decides {when} to refresh (via an attention-aware drift test on the most-attended token) and {where} to refresh (via a depth-aware schedule that recomputes from a chosen layer onward while reusing shallow-layer caches and off-window MASK caches). Unlike fixed-period schemes, Elastic-Cache performs adaptive, layer-aware cache updates for diffusion LLMs, reducing redundant computation and accelerating decoding with negligible loss in generation quality. Experiments on LLaDA-Instruct, LLaDA-1.5, and LLaDA-V across mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks demonstrate consistent speedups: 8.7times on GSM8K (256 tokens), 45.1times on longer sequences, and 4.8times on HumanEval, while consistently maintaining higher accuracy than the baseline. Our method achieves significantly higher throughput (6.8times on GSM8K) than existing confidence-based approaches while preserving generation quality, enabling practical deployment of diffusion LLMs.

Block-wise Adaptive Caching for Accelerating Diffusion Policy

Diffusion Policy has demonstrated strong visuomotor modeling capabilities, but its high computational cost renders it impractical for real-time robotic control. Despite huge redundancy across repetitive denoising steps, existing diffusion acceleration techniques fail to generalize to Diffusion Policy due to fundamental architectural and data divergences. In this paper, we propose Block-wise Adaptive Caching(BAC), a method to accelerate Diffusion Policy by caching intermediate action features. BAC achieves lossless action generation acceleration by adaptively updating and reusing cached features at the block level, based on a key observation that feature similarities vary non-uniformly across timesteps and locks. To operationalize this insight, we first propose the Adaptive Caching Scheduler, designed to identify optimal update timesteps by maximizing the global feature similarities between cached and skipped features. However, applying this scheduler for each block leads to signiffcant error surges due to the inter-block propagation of caching errors, particularly within Feed-Forward Network (FFN) blocks. To mitigate this issue, we develop the Bubbling Union Algorithm, which truncates these errors by updating the upstream blocks with signiffcant caching errors before downstream FFNs. As a training-free plugin, BAC is readily integrable with existing transformer-based Diffusion Policy and vision-language-action models. Extensive experiments on multiple robotic benchmarks demonstrate that BAC achieves up to 3x inference speedup for free.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025

Echo-Forcing: A Scene Memory Framework for Interactive Long Video Generation

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable open-ended generation through local attention and KV caching. However, existing training-free long-video optimization methods mainly focus on stable extension under a single prompt, making them difficult to handle interactive scenarios involving prompt switching, old scene forgetting, and historical scene recall. We identify the core bottleneck as the functional entanglement of historical KV states: stable anchors and recent dynamics are handled by the same cache policy, leading to outdated background contamination, delayed response to new prompts, and loss of long-range memory. To address this issue, we propose Echo-Forcing, a training-free scene memory framework specifically designed for interactive long video generation with three core mechanisms: (1) Hierarchical Temporal Memory, which decouples stable anchors, compressed history, and recent windows under relative RoPE; (2) Scene Recall Frames, which compresses historical scenes into spatially structured KV representations to support long-term recall; and (3) Difference-aware Memory Decay, which adaptively forgets conflicting tokens according to the discrepancy between old and new scenes. Based on these designs, Echo-Forcing uniformly supports smooth transitions, hard cuts, and long-range scene recall under a bounded cache budget. Extensive evaluations on VBench-Long further demonstrate that Echo-Forcing achieves the best overall performance in both long-video generation and interactive video generation settings. Our code is released in https://github.com/mingqiangWu/Echo-Forcing

  • 11 authors
·
May 14 2

SAW-INT4: System-Aware 4-Bit KV-Cache Quantization for Real-World LLM Serving

KV-cache memory is a major bottleneck in real-world LLM serving, where systems must simultaneously support latency-sensitive small-batch requests and high-throughput concurrent workloads. Although many KV-cache compression methods improve offline accuracy or compression ratio, they often violate practical serving constraints such as paged memory layouts, regular memory access, and fused attention execution, limiting their effectiveness in deployment. In this work, we identify the minimal set of 4-bit KV-cache quantization methods that remain viable under these constraints. Our central finding is that a simple design--token-wise INT4 quantization with block-diagonal Hadamard rotation--consistently achieves the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Across multiple models and benchmarks, this approach recovers nearly all of the accuracy lost by naive INT4, while more complex methods such as vector quantization and Hessian-aware quantization provide only marginal additional gains once serving compatibility is taken into account. To make this practical, we implement a fused rotation-quantization kernel that integrates directly into paged KV-cache layouts and introduces zero measurable end-to-end overhead, matching plain INT4 throughput across concurrency levels. Our results show that effective KV-cache compression is fundamentally a systems co-design problem: under real serving constraints, lightweight block-diagonal Hadamard rotation is a viable method that delivers near-lossless accuracy without sacrificing serving efficiency.

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 20

A LoD of Gaussians: Unified Training and Rendering for Ultra-Large Scale Reconstruction with External Memory

Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a high-performance technique for novel view synthesis, enabling real-time rendering and high-quality reconstruction of small scenes. However, scaling to larger environments has so far relied on partitioning the scene into chunks -- a strategy that introduces artifacts at chunk boundaries, complicates training across varying scales, and is poorly suited to unstructured scenarios such as city-scale flyovers combined with street-level views. Moreover, rendering remains fundamentally limited by GPU memory, as all visible chunks must reside in VRAM simultaneously. We introduce A LoD of Gaussians, a framework for training and rendering ultra-large-scale Gaussian scenes on a single consumer-grade GPU -- without partitioning. Our method stores the full scene out-of-core (e.g., in CPU memory) and trains a Level-of-Detail (LoD) representation directly, dynamically streaming only the relevant Gaussians. A hybrid data structure combining Gaussian hierarchies with Sequential Point Trees enables efficient, view-dependent LoD selection, while a lightweight caching and view scheduling system exploits temporal coherence to support real-time streaming and rendering. Together, these innovations enable seamless multi-scale reconstruction and interactive visualization of complex scenes -- from broad aerial views to fine-grained ground-level details.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 16

Understanding Is Done Early: A Depth Division of Labor in Large Language Models and Its Use for Unbounded-Context Memory

Transformer depth is not used uniformly: lower and middle layers build semantic representations, while upper layers increasingly specialize them for prediction. We turn this division of labor into CoMem (Comprehension Memory), which writes each context chunk only through an intermediate layer, retrieves a fixed number of cached residual states, and recomputes the query-conditioned upper layers over the resulting pack. For a fixed retrieval budget, model-side read compute and memory are independent of stored-context length. We evaluate a continued-trained Qwen3-8B base LM under a unified chat-template-free protocol. The backbone is frozen; the flagship trains only a rank-32 self-distillation LoRA on plain PG19, and we report an adapter-free arm separately. CoMem reaches 97.05 on RULER and 38.27 on LoCoMo versus 34.59 for full-context KV-Direct; the dialogue-memory advantage survives conversation-cluster resampling and an independent judge. Results on additional long-context and long-document tasks expose both the benefits of bounded retrieval and its in-window compression tax. Controlled depth sweeps show that deeper caching lowers per-query recomputation but incurs a fidelity loss that self-distillation substantially repairs. In a separate adapter-free efficiency control on an NVIDIA H20 at 128k, CoMem uses 18.26 GB rather than 89.36 GB and achieves a 7.83x prefill speedup. These results show that long-context memory can be organized along the layer axis, not only the token axis.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 29

LMCache: An Efficient KV Cache Layer for Enterprise-Scale LLM Inference

KV cache has traditionally been stored in GPU memory to accelerate the decoding phase of large language model (LLM) inference. However, it is increasingly necessary to move KV caches outside GPU devices, to enable cache reuse across different queries and inference engines. Our real-world usage statistics confirm this trend: over time, the total KV cache stored by users has grown rapidly, far exceeding the capacity of GPU memory. Despite this need, there lacks an efficient solution for offloading and transferring KV caches. We present LMCACHE, the first and so far the most efficient open-source KV caching solution, which extracts and stores KV caches generated by modern LLM engines (vLLM and SGLang) out of the GPU memory and shares them across engines and queries. LMCACHE supports both cache offloading (prefix reuse across queries) and prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation (cross-engine/GPU cache transfer). LMCACHE's high performance and wide adoption stem from the following contributions: (1) highly optimized KV cache data movement powered by batched data movement operations, compute and I/O pipelining; (2) a modular KV cache connector component, decoupling LMCACHE from the rapid evolution of inference engines; (3) a first-class control API for flexible cache orchestration across GPU, CPU, storage, and network layers. Our evaluation shows that combining LMCACHE with vLLM achieves up to 15x improvement in throughput across workloads such as multi-round question answering and document analysis. Large-scale adoption of LMCACHE in enterprise settings provides us valuable insights, for example, fetching KV cache from remote storage has unsurprisingly benefits to prefill delay, and that context truncation, which is a widely applied technique in industry, can greatly reduce prefix cache hit ratio by half. The source code of LMCACHE is at: https://github.com/LMCache/LMCache.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 7, 2025

LouisKV: Efficient KV Cache Retrieval for Long Input-Output Sequences

While Key-Value (KV) cache succeeds in reducing redundant computations in auto-regressive models, it introduces significant memory overhead, limiting its practical deployment in long-sequence scenarios. Existing KV retrieval methods mitigate this by dynamically retaining only a subset of KV entries on the GPU. However, they still suffer from notable efficiency and accuracy bottlenecks due to per-token retrieval and coarse-grained page-level KV management, especially in long-output reasoning scenarios. With the emergence of large reasoning models, efficiently handling such scenarios has become increasingly important. To address this issue, we present two key observations: (1) critical KVs exhibit strong temporal locality during decoding, and (2) these KVs exhibit distinct distribution patterns across the input prompt and generated output. Building on these observations, we propose LouisKV, an efficient KV cache retrieval framework designed for various long-sequence scenarios. Specifically, LouisKV introduces a semantic-aware retrieval strategy leveraging temporal locality to trigger retrieval only at semantic boundaries, drastically reducing computation and data transfer overhead. LouisKV also designs a decoupled, fine-grained management scheme that tailors differentiated strategies for input and output sequences to create retrieval units that better match the model's attention patterns, enabling precise identification of critical KVs. Furthermore, to boost efficiency, LouisKV incorporates several kernel-level optimizations, including custom Triton and CUDA kernels to accelerate the KV clustering and retrieval. Evaluations show that LouisKV achieves up to 4.7times speedup over state-of-the-art KV retrieval methods while maintaining near-lossless accuracy across diverse long-sequence tasks, including long-input short-output, short-input long-output, and long-input long-output scenarios.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 13, 2025

Long-Horizon Streaming Video Generation via Hybrid Attention with Decoupled Distillation

Streaming video generation (SVG) distills a pretrained bidirectional video diffusion model into an autoregressive model equipped with sliding window attention (SWA). However, SWA inevitably loses distant history during long video generation, and its computational overhead remains a critical challenge to real-time deployment. In this work, we propose Hybrid Forcing, which jointly optimizes temporal information retention and computational efficiency through a hybrid attention design. First, we introduce lightweight linear temporal attention to preserve long-range dependencies beyond the sliding window. In particular, we maintain a compact key-value state to incrementally absorb evicted tokens, retaining temporal context with negligible memory and computational overhead. Second, we incorporate block-sparse attention into the local sliding window to reduce redundant computation within short-range modeling, reallocating computational capacity toward more critical dependencies. Finally, we introduce a decoupled distillation strategy tailored to the hybrid attention design. A few-step initial distillation is performed under dense attention, then the distillation of our proposed linear temporal and block-sparse attention is activated for streaming modeling, ensuring stable optimization. Extensive experiments on both short- and long-form video generation benchmarks demonstrate that Hybrid Forcing consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our model achieves real-time, unbounded 832x480 video generation at 29.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU without quantization or model compression. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/leeruibin/hybrid-forcing.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 27

dKV-Cache: The Cache for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have been seen as a promising competitor for autoregressive language models. However, diffusion language models have long been constrained by slow inference. A core challenge is that their non-autoregressive architecture and bidirectional attention preclude the key-value cache that accelerates decoding. We address this bottleneck by proposing a KV-cache-like mechanism, delayed KV-Cache, for the denoising process of DLMs. Our approach is motivated by the observation that different tokens have distinct representation dynamics throughout the diffusion process. Accordingly, we propose a delayed and conditioned caching strategy for key and value states. We design two complementary variants to cache key and value step-by-step: (1) dKV-Cache-Decode, which provides almost lossless acceleration, and even improves performance on long sequences, suggesting that existing DLMs may under-utilise contextual information during inference. (2) dKV-Cache-Greedy, which has aggressive caching with reduced lifespan, achieving higher speed-ups with quadratic time complexity at the cost of some performance degradation. dKV-Cache, in final, achieves from 2-10x speedup in inference, largely narrowing the gap between ARs and DLMs. We evaluate our dKV-Cache on several benchmarks, delivering acceleration across general language understanding, mathematical, and code-generation benchmarks. Experiments demonstrate that cache can also be used in DLMs, even in a training-free manner from current DLMs.

  • 4 authors
·
May 21, 2025 2

Less is Enough: Training-Free Video Diffusion Acceleration via Runtime-Adaptive Caching

Video generation models have demonstrated remarkable performance, yet their broader adoption remains constrained by slow inference speeds and substantial computational costs, primarily due to the iterative nature of the denoising process. Addressing this bottleneck is essential for democratizing advanced video synthesis technologies and enabling their integration into real-world applications. This work proposes EasyCache, a training-free acceleration framework for video diffusion models. EasyCache introduces a lightweight, runtime-adaptive caching mechanism that dynamically reuses previously computed transformation vectors, avoiding redundant computations during inference. Unlike prior approaches, EasyCache requires no offline profiling, pre-computation, or extensive parameter tuning. We conduct comprehensive studies on various large-scale video generation models, including OpenSora, Wan2.1, and HunyuanVideo. Our method achieves leading acceleration performance, reducing inference time by up to 2.1-3.3times compared to the original baselines while maintaining high visual fidelity with a significant up to 36% PSNR improvement compared to the previous SOTA method. This improvement makes our EasyCache a efficient and highly accessible solution for high-quality video generation in both research and practical applications. The code is available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/EasyCache.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 3, 2025

VideoMLA: Low-Rank Latent KV Cache for Minute-Scale Autoregressive Video Diffusion

Long-rollout causal video diffusion has converged on a fixed-size sliding-window KV cache, with recent progress innovating within this layout by changing which tokens occupy the window or how their positions are encoded. The per-head KV layout itself, a dominant contributor to streaming memory and latency, has been mostly left unchanged. In this paper, we present the first study of Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) in video diffusion. VideoMLA replaces per-head keys and values with a shared low-rank content latent and a shared decoupled 3D-RoPE positional key, reducing per-token KV memory by 92.7% at every cached layer. We further investigate why MLA succeeds in video diffusion even though the spectral assumption often used to motivate it in language models does not hold: pretrained video attention is not low-rank, with 99%-energy effective rank far above any practical latent dimension. VideoMLA retains quality at compression ratios where direct spectral approximation would predict large reconstruction error. We show that the MLA bottleneck, rather than the pretrained spectrum, determines the effective rank: both spectral and random initialization occupy nearly the full rank budget from initialization, and training preserves this budget while adapting within it. On VBench, VideoMLA matches short-horizon streaming video diffusion baselines, achieves the best overall score at long horizons among evaluated methods, and improves throughput by 1.23x on a single B200.

mayzovt Virginia Tech
·
May 27 2

CachedSearch: Training-Free Cached Exploration for Test-Time Search in Video Diffusion

Test-time search lets small video diffusion models rival larger ones, but costs 2-10x more. All candidates are fully denoised, although most are discarded. Training-free caching makes each rollout 2-3x faster at near-lossless quality. Composition is safe only if lossy caching preserves verifier rankings. We present the first study of whether caching corrupts candidate ranking in video test-time search. On Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B with an adaptive caching wrapper (~2x per-candidate speedup), ImageReward scores seed-matched cached and full rollouts. Median per-prompt Spearman rank correlation is 0.905, with 72% top-1 agreement on the VBench suite. VBench-2.0 replicates this result on a harder suite. Recomputing the cached winner at full compute retains 90-94% of the full-search gain. Errors cluster among near-tied candidates, making corruption self-limiting. This finding leads to CachedSearch. It explores every candidate with aggressive caching, then re-generates only the winner at full compute. At N=8, it captures 94.7% of best-of-N's gain at 63% of the cost. Capture rises with width. At matched budget, it searches twice as wide for 38% more gain. The result holds from 1.3B-14B across six models and four families: Wan, LTX, CogVideoX, and Hunyuan. Wan2.1-14B matches the 1.3B model's fidelity. Mid-trajectory pruning multiplies the exploration saving to 3.11x at 88.6% capture. Ports to other model families require recalibrating a single parameter, showing that fidelity tracks architecture rather than parameter count. CachedSearch is training-free, verifier-agnostic, and orthogonal to the search algorithm, making it a plug-in multiplier for test-time scaling.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 29

HYPIC: Accelerating Hybrid-Attention LLM Serving with Position-Independent Caching

In retrieval-augmented generation and agentic LLM serving, prompts are assembled from independent segments into long contexts, making the prefill stage dominate per-request cost. Two directions have emerged to reduce this cost: position-independent caching (PIC) admits KV reuse for non-contiguous segments shared across requests, while hybrid-attention models cut computation by replacing most full-attention layers with linear attention. However, they cannot coexist: applying existing PIC methods to hybrid-attention models breaks down because per-token KV-cache reuse primitives do not transfer to the per-request recurrent state. We present Hypic, the first system to accelerate hybrid-attention LLM serving with position-independent caching. For linear-attention layers, we identify the segment-cumulative transition operator as the missing algebraic primitive and cache it alongside each segment's zero-start end-state, enabling near-exact and constant-time composition of independently cached segments. For the remaining full-attention layers, existing PIC methods also fail because linear layers do not expose the per-token hidden states needed for selective recomputation. We show that the largest deviations concentrate at segment beginnings and construct a small seam window that propagates hidden states through the hybrid-attention stack to repair cross-segment attention. Finally, Hypic introduces segment parallelism, which exploits PIC's segment-level self-containment to parallelize cache-miss prefill across instances, turning long cold requests into an accelerable workload. Evaluated across four hybrid-attention models and five workloads, Hypic reduces time-to-first-token by 3.25times on average and improves QPS by 1.66times over Prefix Cache, while preserving task quality with a 1.71-point gap from Full Recompute.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 11

Deep Forcing: Training-Free Long Video Generation with Deep Sink and Participative Compression

Recent advances in autoregressive video diffusion have enabled real-time frame streaming, yet existing solutions still suffer from temporal repetition, drift, and motion deceleration. We find that naively applying StreamingLLM-style attention sinks to video diffusion leads to fidelity degradation and motion stagnation. To overcome this, we introduce Deep Forcing, which consists of two training-free mechanisms that address this without any fine-tuning. Specifically, 1) Deep Sink dedicates half of the sliding window to persistent sink tokens and re-aligns their temporal RoPE phase to the current timeline, stabilizing global context during long rollouts. 2) Participative Compression performs importance-aware KV cache pruning that preserves only tokens actively participating in recent attention while safely discarding redundant and degraded history, minimizing error accumulation under out-of-distribution length generation. Together, these components enable over 12x extrapolation (e.g. 5s-trained to 60s+ generation) with better imaging quality than LongLive, better aesthetic quality than RollingForcing, almost maintaining overall consistency, and substantial gains in dynamic degree, all while maintaining real-time generation. Our results demonstrate that training-free KV-cache management can match or exceed training-based approaches for autoregressively streaming long-video generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025 2

vAttention: Dynamic Memory Management for Serving LLMs without PagedAttention

Efficient use of GPU memory is essential for high throughput LLM inference. Prior systems reserved memory for the KV-cache ahead-of-time, resulting in wasted capacity due to internal fragmentation. Inspired by OS-based virtual memory systems, vLLM proposed PagedAttention to enable dynamic memory allocation for KV-cache. This approach eliminates fragmentation, enabling high-throughput LLM serving with larger batch sizes. However, to be able to allocate physical memory dynamically, PagedAttention changes the layout of KV-cache from contiguous virtual memory to non-contiguous virtual memory. This change requires attention kernels to be rewritten to support paging, and serving framework to implement a memory manager. Thus, the PagedAttention model leads to software complexity, portability issues, redundancy and inefficiency. In this paper, we propose vAttention for dynamic KV-cache memory management. In contrast to PagedAttention, vAttention retains KV-cache in contiguous virtual memory and leverages low-level system support for demand paging, that already exists, to enable on-demand physical memory allocation. Thus, vAttention unburdens the attention kernel developer from having to explicitly support paging and avoids re-implementation of memory management in the serving framework. We show that vAttention enables seamless dynamic memory management for unchanged implementations of various attention kernels. vAttention also generates tokens up to 1.97x faster than vLLM, while processing input prompts up to 3.92x and 1.45x faster than the PagedAttention variants of FlashAttention and FlashInfer.

  • 5 authors
·
May 7, 2024

Addressable Memory for Video World Models

We study visual persistence in interactive video world models. These models rely on a Key-Value (KV) cache as a growing visual memory to carry forward previously generated frames. However, we find that models can no longer reliably address stored content once rollouts extend beyond the training horizon, because temporal Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) offsets then fall outside the range seen during training and the model struggles to retrieve the relevant visual information through attention. Moreover, naively compressing the cache in the RoPE-rotated space corrupts memory by averaging together incompatible positional phases. To address this, we propose WorldTrace, a training-free memory framework for long-horizon visual persistence. WorldTrace keeps compressed memory addressable by assigning each summary slot a distinct, in-distribution virtual position. Within this addressable cache, we study two memory compression approaches: WorldTrace-Field compresses history for temporal coherence, while WorldTrace-Landmark stores verbatim scene traces at detected transitions for episodic recall. We further introduce LoopBench, a benchmark evaluating whether a compressed cache can reconstruct a previously visited scene after a long detour. WorldTrace-Field improves temporal consistency by +15.5%, and WorldTrace-Landmark improves episodic recall by +19.5% on LoopBench, extending visually persistent generation without retraining.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Aug 6 1

KVShare: An LLM Service System with Efficient and Effective Multi-Tenant KV Cache Reuse

Recent advances in long-text understanding have pushed the context length of large language models (LLMs) up to one million tokens. It boosts LLMs's accuracy and reasoning capacity but causes exorbitant computational costs and unsatisfactory Time to First Token (TTFT). KV cache reuse, which reuses the exact same KV cache of prefixes and templates or shares similar ones but with extra selective recomputation, offers a promising way to tackle this issue. However, prior studies overlook the cross-request KV reuse and the attention deviations introduced by new tokens during the decoding stage. In this paper, we present a KV cache management module that shares the KV cache across requests under multi-tenant scenarios without sacrificing model accuracy. Our system, KVShare, enables accurate and efficient LLM serving by 1) a Dual-Stage High Deviation algorithm (DHD) that conditionally selects a small portion of KV cache to be recomputed during both prefill and decode phases, and 2) a cache-aware scheduler that prioritizes requests based on their KV cache hit rates and orchestrates continuous batching to achieve enhanced system efficiency and faster TTFT. Multi-task experiments conducted on models such as Qwen2.5-7B,Llama3.1-8B and Yi1.5-9B demonstrate that KVShare reduces TTFT by up to 9.39x and increases 1.2x of the throughput compared to the full KV recompute. Moreover, KVShare achieves 20.38% boost in terms of accuracy compared to SOTA methods.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 17, 2025

RelayCaching: Accelerating LLM Collaboration via Decoding KV Cache Reuse

The increasing complexity of AI tasks has shifted the paradigm from monolithic models toward multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems. However, these collaborative architectures introduce a critical bottleneck: redundant prefill computation for shared content generated by previous agents, which significantly increases KV cache memory usage and time-to-first-token (TTFT). While various KV cache methods have been proposed to mitigate prefill redundancy, they either fail to maintain accuracy on agent-generated outputs or exhibit low reuse rates due to rigid constraints. We present RelayCaching, a training-free inference method that directly reuses decoding phase KV caches from previous agents in subsequent prefill phases. Our key insight is that KV caches for identical content are highly consistent across phases, while prefix-induced deviations are sparse and localized within a limited range of layers and token positions. By selectively recomputing KV caches at these positions, RelayCaching preserves model accuracy with minimal overhead, yielding a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off over existing methods. Experiments on diverse collaborative LLM tasks spanning mathematical reasoning, general knowledge, and code generation demonstrate that RelayCaching achieves over 80% KV cache reuse, reduces TTFT by up to 4.7times compared to the standard pipeline, all with negligible accuracy degradation.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 27

Avatar-Forever: Decoupled Parallel Training for High-Quality Real-Time Infinite Avatars

Existing streaming video systems often rely on sequential, distillation-centered training pipelines to enable few-step long-video generation. However, this paradigm suffers from two limitations. First, failures or distribution shifts introduced in earlier stages affect later optimization, complicating the training process to converge. Second, the distillation-centric objective favours short-term generation but is prone to quality degradation when autoregressive errors accumulate over long rollouts. We propose Avatar-Forever, a decoupled parallel training framework for high-quality real-time infinite interactive avatars. Instead of coupling generation efficiency and long-horizon robustness under a sequential distillation pipeline, we treat them as two independent capabilities that can be trained in parallel. One branch performs full-parameter distillation to train an efficient generator with high visual quality, while another trains a lightweight long-horizon adapter via Recovery-oriented Rollout Training (RRT), which improves generation robustness under long-horizon inference conditions. Our decoupled parallel training design simplifies the overall training process and avoids unnecessary objective conflicts between few-step generation and long-horizon adaptation. We further introduce ForeverCache, a chunk-wise feature caching mechanism to substantially reduce redundant history computation during streaming inference. Built upon a 22B video foundation model, Avatar-Forever supports unbounded audio-driven avatar generation while maintaining identity consistency, motion coherence, and visual fidelity, enabling an end-to-end throughput of high-resolution 768x512 videos at 27.2 FPS on a single H100 GPU and providing a practical path toward stable digital humans.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 11

LASER: Layer-wise Scale Alignment for Training-Free Streaming 4D Reconstruction

Recent feed-forward reconstruction models like VGGT and π^3 achieve impressive reconstruction quality but cannot process streaming videos due to quadratic memory complexity, limiting their practical deployment. While existing streaming methods address this through learned memory mechanisms or causal attention, they require extensive retraining and may not fully leverage the strong geometric priors of state-of-the-art offline models. We propose LASER, a training-free framework that converts an offline reconstruction model into a streaming system by aligning predictions across consecutive temporal windows. We observe that simple similarity transformation (Sim(3)) alignment fails due to layer depth misalignment: monocular scale ambiguity causes relative depth scales of different scene layers to vary inconsistently between windows. To address this, we introduce layer-wise scale alignment, which segments depth predictions into discrete layers, computes per-layer scale factors, and propagates them across both adjacent windows and timestamps. Extensive experiments show that LASER achieves state-of-the-art performance on camera pose estimation and point map reconstruction %quality with offline models while operating at 14 FPS with 6 GB peak memory on a RTX A6000 GPU, enabling practical deployment for kilometer-scale streaming videos. Project website: https://neu-vi.github.io/LASER/{https://neu-vi.github.io/LASER/}

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 15, 2025

Progressive Supernet Training for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Visual Auto-Regressive (VAR) models significantly reduce inference steps through the "next-scale" prediction paradigm. However, progressive multi-scale generation incurs substantial memory overhead due to cumulative KV caching, limiting practical deployment. We observe a scale-depth asymmetric dependency in VAR: early scales exhibit extreme sensitivity to network depth, while later scales remain robust to depth reduction. Inspired by this, we propose VARiant: by equidistant sampling, we select multiple subnets ranging from 16 to 2 layers from the original 30-layer VAR-d30 network. Early scales are processed by the full network, while later scales utilize subnet. Subnet and the full network share weights, enabling flexible depth adjustment within a single model. However, weight sharing between subnet and the entire network can lead to optimization conflicts. To address this, we propose a progressive training strategy that breaks through the Pareto frontier of generation quality for both subnets and the full network under fixed-ratio training, achieving joint optimality. Experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that, compared to the pretrained VAR-d30 (FID 1.95), VARiant-d16 and VARiant-d8 achieve nearly equivalent quality (FID 2.05/2.12) while reducing memory consumption by 40-65%. VARiant-d2 achieves 3.5 times speedup and 80% memory reduction at moderate quality cost (FID 2.97). In terms of deployment, VARiant's single-model architecture supports zero-cost runtime depth switching and provides flexible deployment options from high quality to extreme efficiency, catering to diverse application scenarios.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 20, 2025

Auto-scaling Continuous Memory for GUI Agent

We study how to endow GUI agents with scalable memory that help generalize across unfamiliar interfaces and long-horizon tasks. Prior GUI agents compress past trajectories into text tokens, which balloons context length and misses decisive visual cues (e.g., exact widget size and position). We propose a continuous memory that encodes each GUI trajectory into a fixed-length sequence of continuous embeddings using the VLM itself as an encoder; these embeddings are plugged directly into the backbone's input layer, sharply reducing context cost while preserving fine-grained visual information. As memory size and retrieval depth increase, performance improves monotonically, unlike text memories that degrade with long prompts. To grow memory at low cost, we introduce an auto-scaling data flywheel that (i) discovers new environments via search, (ii) synthesizes tasks with an open-source VLM, (iii) rolls out trajectories with the agent, and (iv) verifies success with the same VLM. Using this pipeline, we collect 100k+ trajectories for about \$4000 and fine-tune only the memory encoder (LoRA on a Q-Former, 1.2\% parameters) with 1,500 samples. On real-world GUI benchmarks, our memory-augmented agent consistently improves success rates under long horizons and distribution shifts. Notably, Qwen-2.5-VL-7B + continuous memory achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art closed-source models (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude-4).

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025

Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion and World Models with Temporal Cache Compression and Sparse Attention

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation, opening the door to long-form synthesis, video world models, and interactive neural game engines. However, their core attention layers become a major bottleneck at inference time: as generation progresses, the KV cache grows, causing both increasing latency and escalating GPU memory, which in turn restricts usable temporal context and harms long-range consistency. In this work, we study redundancy in autoregressive video diffusion and identify three persistent sources: near-duplicate cached keys across frames, slowly evolving (largely semantic) queries/keys that make many attention computations redundant, and cross-attention over long prompts where only a small subset of tokens matters per frame. Building on these observations, we propose a unified, training-free attention framework for autoregressive diffusion: TempCache compresses the KV cache via temporal correspondence to bound cache growth; AnnCA accelerates cross-attention by selecting frame-relevant prompt tokens using fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) matching; and AnnSA sparsifies self-attention by restricting each query to semantically matched keys, also using a lightweight ANN. Together, these modules reduce attention, compute, and memory and are compatible with existing autoregressive diffusion backbones and world models. Experiments demonstrate up to x5--x10 end-to-end speedups while preserving near-identical visual quality and, crucially, maintaining stable throughput and nearly constant peak GPU memory usage over long rollouts, where prior methods progressively slow down and suffer from increasing memory usage.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 2 2

Forcing-KV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models

Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models adopt a streaming generation framework, enabling long-horizon video generation with real-time responsiveness, as exemplified by the Self Forcing training paradigm. However, existing AR video diffusion models still suffer from significant attention complexity and severe memory overhead due to the redundant key-value (KV) caches across historical frames, which limits scalability. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by introducing KV cache compression into autoregressive video diffusion. We observe that attention heads in mainstream AR diffusion models exhibit markedly distinct attention patterns and functional roles that remain stable across samples and denoising steps. Building on our empirical study of head-wise functional specialization, we divide the attention heads into two categories: static heads, which focus on transitions across autoregressive chunks and intra-frame fidelity, and dynamic heads, which govern inter-frame motion and consistency. We then propose Forcing-KV, a hybrid KV cache compression strategy that performs structured static pruning for static heads and dynamic pruning based on segment-wise similarity for dynamic heads. While maintaining output quality, our method achieves a generation speed of over 29 frames per second on a single NVIDIA H200 GPU along with 30% cache memory reduction, delivering up to 1.35x and 1.50x speedups on LongLive and Self Forcing at 480P resolution, and further scaling to 2.82x speedup at 1080P resolution. Code and demo videos are provided at https://zju-jiyicheng.github.io/Forcing-KV-Page.

HorizonStream: Long-Horizon Attention for Streaming 3D Reconstruction

Online 3D reconstruction requires estimating camera pose and scene geometry under strict causal and bounded-memory constraints. Existing methods often suffer from drift, jitter, or collapse on long sequences. We trace these failures to a fundamental mismatch. Streaming geometry is inherently temporally heterogeneous, with evidence ranging from short-lived correspondences to persistent global scale. However, current architectures impose uniform and pathological influence patterns. For example, sliding windows enforce hard cutoffs, while ungated recurrence and causal attention cause cache saturation and spike-like attention sinks. To resolve this, we formalize geometric propagation as an evidence influence kernel and propose HorizonStream, a long-horizon Transformer that explicitly factorizes this kernel. For the long-range temporal factor, Geometric Linear Attention learns channel-wise decay rates to enable bounded, multi-timescale propagation of geometric evidence. For the short-range spatial factor, Geometric Local Attention with Spatiotemporal RoPE performs reliable 3D matching while suppressing attention sinks. Finally, Metric Readout Tokens recover stable scale and rigid pose directly from the persistent geometric state. Extensive experiments show that HorizonStream, trained on only 48-frame clips, generalizes stably to sequences exceeding 10,000\ frames with constant memory and linear time, achieving state-of-the-art streaming 3D reconstruction performance. Project Page: https://3dagentworld.github.io/horizonstream/

Streaming Video Question-Answering with In-context Video KV-Cache Retrieval

We propose ReKV, a novel training-free approach that enables efficient streaming video question-answering (StreamingVQA), by seamlessly integrating with existing Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs). Traditional VideoQA systems struggle with long videos, as they must process entire videos before responding to queries, and repeat this process for each new question. In contrast, our approach analyzes long videos in a streaming manner, allowing for prompt responses as soon as user queries are received. Building on a common Video-LLM, we first incorporate a sliding-window attention mechanism, ensuring that input frames attend to a limited number of preceding frames, thereby reducing computational overhead. To prevent information loss, we store processed video key-value caches (KV-Caches) in RAM and disk, reloading them into GPU memory as needed. Additionally, we introduce a retrieval method that leverages an external retriever or the parameters within Video-LLMs to retrieve only query-relevant KV-Caches, ensuring both efficiency and accuracy in question answering. ReKV enables the separation of video encoding and question-answering across different processes and GPUs, significantly enhancing the efficiency of StreamingVQA. Through comprehensive experimentation, we validate the efficacy and practicality of our approach, which significantly boosts efficiency and enhances applicability over existing VideoQA models.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 1, 2025

UniT: Unified Geometry Learning with Group Autoregressive Transformer

Recent feed-forward models have significantly advanced geometry perception for inferring dense 3D structure from sensor observations. However, its essential capabilities remain fragmented across multiple incompatible paradigms, including online perception, offline reconstruction, multi-modal integration, long-horizon scalability, and metric-scale estimation. We present UniT, a unified model built upon a novel Group Autoregressive Transformer, which reformulates these seemingly disparate capabilities within a single framework. The key idea is to treat groups of sensor observations as the basic autoregressive units and predict the corresponding point maps in an anchor-free and scale-adaptive manner. More specifically, diverse view configurations in both online and offline settings are naturally unified within a single group autoregression process. By varying the group size, online mode operates over multiple autoregressive steps with single-frame groups, whereas offline mode aggregates a multi-frame group in a single forward pass. Meanwhile, a queue-style KV caching mechanism ensures bounded autoregressive memory over long horizons. This is enabled by reducing long-range dependencies on early frames through anchor-free relational modeling, thereby allowing outdated memory to be discarded on the fly. To improve metric-scale generalization across scenes, a scale-adaptive geometry loss is further introduced within this framework. It couples relative geometric constraints with a partial absolute scale term, implicitly regularizing global scale and inducing a progressive transition from scale-invariant geometry to metric-scale solutions. Together with a dedicated modal attention module for integrating auxiliary modalities, UniT achieves state-of-the-art performance in unified geometry perception, as validated on ten benchmarks spanning seven representative tasks.

HKUSTGZ HKUSTGZ
·
May 19 1

StreamingVLM: Real-Time Understanding for Infinite Video Streams

Vision-language models (VLMs) could power real-time assistants and autonomous agents, but they face a critical challenge: understanding near-infinite video streams without escalating latency and memory usage. Processing entire videos with full attention leads to quadratic computational costs and poor performance on long videos. Meanwhile, simple sliding window methods are also flawed, as they either break coherence or suffer from high latency due to redundant recomputation. In this paper, we introduce StreamingVLM, a model designed for real-time, stable understanding of infinite visual input. Our approach is a unified framework that aligns training with streaming inference. During inference, we maintain a compact KV cache by reusing states of attention sinks, a short window of recent vision tokens, and a long window of recent text tokens. This streaming ability is instilled via a simple supervised fine-tuning (SFT) strategy that applies full attention on short, overlapped video chunks, which effectively mimics the inference-time attention pattern without training on prohibitively long contexts. For evaluation, we build Inf-Streams-Eval, a new benchmark with videos averaging over two hours that requires dense, per-second alignment between frames and text. On Inf-Streams-Eval, StreamingVLM achieves a 66.18% win rate against GPT-4O mini and maintains stable, real-time performance at up to 8 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100. Notably, our SFT strategy also enhances general VQA abilities without any VQA-specific fine-tuning, improving performance on LongVideoBench by +4.30 and OVOBench Realtime by +5.96. Code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/streaming-vlm.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025 3

AdaState: Self-Evolving Anchors for Streaming Video Generation

Autoregressive video diffusion models generate streaming video by producing frames sequentially, conditioning each chunk on previously generated content. These models are structurally anchored to the first frame: its key-value representation occupies a privileged position in the attention cache and serves as the primary scene reference throughout generation. As the cleanest and most error-free position in the cache, this anchor draws disproportionate attention, suppressing video dynamics, and locking scene composition to the initial viewpoint even as the scene naturally evolves. The result is a temporally shallow video in which motion, camera movement, and scene progression are dampened in favor of static consistency. To address this, we replace the static anchor with an adaptive state, a hidden latent that the model denoises alongside content at every chunk but never renders. Rather than referencing a frozen first frame, the model generates its own scene anchor at each step by attending to both the previous state and the current content, producing a reference that evolves with the generated content. Unlike standard video generation, which encodes an absolute notion of time, our formulation treats time as relative: every generation step sees the same positional structure regardless of how far generation has progressed, and the state transition is identical at every chunk. Together, these properties introduce a recurrence into the generation process, where denoising serves as the transition function, and the KV cache serves as the carrier, requiring no external module. Experiments demonstrate that the adaptive state substantially improves video dynamics, enabling richer motion and natural scene progression within generated videos.

mayzovt Virginia Tech
·
May 27 2

POLAR: Online Learning for LoRA Adapter Caching and Routing in Edge LLM Serving

Edge deployment of large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on libraries of lightweight LoRA adapters, yet GPU/DRAM can keep only a small resident subset at a time. Serving a request through a non-resident adapter requires paging its weights from storage, incurring measurable latency. This creates a two-timescale online control problem: on a slow timescale, the system selects which adapters remain resident in fast memory, while on a fast timescale it routes each request to an adapter whose context-dependent utility is unknown a priori. The two decisions are tightly coupled: the cache determines the cost of exploration, and the router determines which adapters receive informative feedback. We formulate this joint caching-and-routing problem as a two-timescale contextual bandit and propose POLAR (Paging and Online Learning for Adapter Routing). POLAR pairs a cache-aware LinUCB router with an epoch-based cache controller. We study two variants. A fixed-epoch version provides a robust baseline with worst-case regret guarantees under arbitrary contexts. An epoch-doubling version, POLAR+, adds forced exploration and improved cache optimization to achieve mathcal{O}(dNT+KT) sublinear regret under stochastic regularity and cacheability conditions, where N is the adapter count, K the cache size, d the context dimension, and T the horizon. The routing term matches the standard contextual-bandit rate up to logarithmic factors, showing that the memory hierarchy does not fundamentally slow routing learning. Experiments using 15 real LoRA adapters for Qwen2.5-7B together with measured GPU paging latencies show that adaptive cache control substantially outperforms non-adaptive baselines and exhibits scaling trends consistent with the theory.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 16

CacheQuant: Comprehensively Accelerated Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have gradually gained prominence in the field of image synthesis, showcasing remarkable generative capabilities. Nevertheless, the slow inference and complex networks, resulting from redundancy at both temporal and structural levels, hinder their low-latency applications in real-world scenarios. Current acceleration methods for diffusion models focus separately on temporal and structural levels. However, independent optimization at each level to further push the acceleration limits results in significant performance degradation. On the other hand, integrating optimizations at both levels can compound the acceleration effects. Unfortunately, we find that the optimizations at these two levels are not entirely orthogonal. Performing separate optimizations and then simply integrating them results in unsatisfactory performance. To tackle this issue, we propose CacheQuant, a novel training-free paradigm that comprehensively accelerates diffusion models by jointly optimizing model caching and quantization techniques. Specifically, we employ a dynamic programming approach to determine the optimal cache schedule, in which the properties of caching and quantization are carefully considered to minimize errors. Additionally, we propose decoupled error correction to further mitigate the coupled and accumulated errors step by step. Experimental results show that CacheQuant achieves a 5.18 speedup and 4 compression for Stable Diffusion on MS-COCO, with only a 0.02 loss in CLIP score. Our code are open-sourced: https://github.com/BienLuky/CacheQuant .

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 3, 2025

Tutti: Making SSD-Backed KV Cache Practical for Long-Context LLM Serving

LLM serving relies on prefix caching to improve inference performance. As growing contexts push key-value (KV) cache footprint far beyond GPU HBM and CPU DRAM capacity, KV cache is increasingly offloaded to NVMe SSDs. Unfortunately, restoring KV cache from SSDs suffers from poor I/O performance and incurs significant GPU stalls. This is primarily because the fragmented GPU memory layout results in a massive number of tiny random I/Os, rendering the low-parallelism CPU a severe bottleneck even with GPU Direct Storage (GDS), which still relies on CPU intervention to initiate each I/O and thus remains CPU-centric. This paper presents Tutti, an efficient SSD-backed KV caching solution that eliminates CPU intervention from the critical data and I/O control paths between HBM and SSDs. At the core of Tutti is a GPU-centric KV cache object store, in which the CPU is only responsible for asynchronously loading I/O kernels once per layer to the GPU. Tutti saturates NVMe SSD bandwidth and reduces GPU stalls to near zero through the following designs: (i) we provide a GPU-native object abstraction that enables bulk KV cache transfers and management; (ii) we re-architect the GPU storage stack by introducing GPU io_uring to support asynchronous GPU direct object I/O; and (iii) we propose slack-aware I/O scheduling to avoid GPU resource contention. We have implemented Tutti and integrated it to vLLM. Extensive evaluation shows that compared to the state-of-the-art GDS-enabled, SSD-backed LMCache, Tutti reduces TTFT by 78.3% under strict SLO constraints and improves the achievable request rate by 2x. The serving cost is reduced by 27%. Tutti achieves nearly the same inference performance as DRAM-backed LMCache, while providing almost infinite capacity.

  • 9 authors
·
May 4

InstInfer: In-Storage Attention Offloading for Cost-Effective Long-Context LLM Inference

The widespread of Large Language Models (LLMs) marks a significant milestone in generative AI. Nevertheless, the increasing context length and batch size in offline LLM inference escalate the memory requirement of the key-value (KV) cache, which imposes a huge burden on the GPU VRAM, especially for resource-constraint scenarios (e.g., edge computing and personal devices). Several cost-effective solutions leverage host memory or SSDs to reduce storage costs for offline inference scenarios and improve the throughput. Nevertheless, they suffer from significant performance penalties imposed by intensive KV cache accesses due to limited PCIe bandwidth. To address these issues, we propose InstInfer, a novel LLM inference system that offloads the most performance-critical computation (i.e., attention in decoding phase) and data (i.e., KV cache) parts to Computational Storage Drives (CSDs), which minimize the enormous KV transfer overheads. InstInfer designs a dedicated flash-aware in-storage attention engine with KV cache management mechanisms to exploit the high internal bandwidths of CSDs instead of being limited by the PCIe bandwidth. The optimized P2P transmission between GPU and CSDs further reduces data migration overheads. Experimental results demonstrate that for a 13B model using an NVIDIA A6000 GPU, InstInfer improves throughput for long-sequence inference by up to 11.1times, compared to existing SSD-based solutions such as FlexGen.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 8, 2024 2

LRAgent: Efficient KV Cache Sharing for Multi-LoRA LLM Agents

Role specialization in multi-LLM agent systems is often realized via multi-LoRA, where agents share a pretrained backbone and differ only through lightweight adapters. Despite sharing base model weights, each agent independently builds and stores its own KV cache for the same long, tool-augmented trajectories, incurring substantial memory and compute overhead. Existing KV cache sharing methods largely overlook this multi-LoRA setting. We observe that, across agents, cache differences are dominated by adapter outputs, while activations from the shared pretrained backbone remain highly similar. Based on this observation, we propose LRAgent, a KV cache sharing framework for multi-LoRA agents that decomposes the cache into a shared base component from the pretrained weights and an adapter-dependent component from LoRA weights. LRAgent reduces memory overhead by sharing the base component and storing the adapter component in its inherent low-rank form, and further reduces compute overhead, enabled by shared-A multi-LoRA architectures, by also sharing the low-rank cache and avoiding redundant computations for contexts already processed by other agents. To efficiently reconstruct adapter contributions at runtime, we introduce Flash-LoRA-Attention, a kernel that reorders attention computation to avoid materializing the low-rank cache to full dimension. LRAgent achieves throughput and time-to-first-token latency close to fully shared caching, while preserving accuracy near the non-shared caching baseline across agentic question-answering benchmarks.

Efficient Inference of Vision Instruction-Following Models with Elastic Cache

In the field of instruction-following large vision-language models (LVLMs), the efficient deployment of these models faces challenges, notably due to the high memory demands of their key-value (KV) caches. Conventional cache management strategies for LLMs focus on cache eviction, which often fails to address the specific needs of multimodal instruction-following models. Recognizing this gap, in this paper, we introduce Elastic Cache, a novel approach that benefits from applying distinct acceleration methods for instruction encoding and output generation stages. We investigate the metrics of importance in different stages and propose an importance-driven cache merging strategy to prune redundancy caches. Instead of discarding less important caches, our strategy identifies important key/value vectors as anchor points. Surrounding less important caches are then merged with these anchors, enhancing the preservation of contextual information in the KV caches while yielding an arbitrary acceleration ratio. For instruction encoding, we utilize the frequency to evaluate the importance of caches. Regarding output generation, we prioritize tokens based on their distance with an offset, by which both the initial and most recent tokens are retained. Results on a range of LVLMs demonstrate that Elastic Cache not only boosts efficiency but also notably outperforms existing pruning methods in language generation across various tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/liuzuyan/ElasticCache

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024 2

CSKV: Training-Efficient Channel Shrinking for KV Cache in Long-Context Scenarios

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted to process long-context tasks. However, the large memory overhead of the key-value (KV) cache poses significant challenges in long-context scenarios. Existing training-free KV cache compression methods typically focus on quantization and token pruning, which have compression limits, and excessive sparsity can lead to severe performance degradation. Other methods design new architectures with less KV overhead but require significant training overhead. To address the above two drawbacks, we further explore the redundancy in the channel dimension and apply an architecture-level design with minor training costs. Therefore, we introduce CSKV, a training-efficient Channel Shrinking technique for KV cache compression: (1) We first analyze the singular value distribution of the KV cache, revealing significant redundancy and compression potential along the channel dimension. Based on this observation, we propose using low-rank decomposition for key and value layers and storing the low-dimension features. (2) To preserve model performance, we introduce a bi-branch KV cache, including a window-based full-precision KV cache and a low-precision compressed KV cache. (3) To reduce the training costs, we minimize the layer-wise reconstruction loss for the compressed KV cache instead of retraining the entire LLMs. Extensive experiments show that CSKV can reduce the memory overhead of the KV cache by 80% while maintaining the model's long-context capability. Moreover, we show that our method can be seamlessly combined with quantization to further reduce the memory overhead, achieving a compression ratio of up to 95%.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 16, 2024

Continuum: Efficient and Robust Multi-Turn LLM Agent Scheduling with KV Cache Time-to-Live

Agentic LLM applications interleave LLM generation requests with tool calls. These tool calls break the continuity of the workflow by creating pauses between LLM requests, bringing many challenges for the serving system, especially under multi-turn scenarios. Each pause potentially causes KV cache eviction and extra waiting time before entering the continuous batch for the following LLM request. Since these pauses happen for each call, this problem becomes increasingly severe as turn number grow for agentic programs. Previous works either fail to incorporate information from the tool call, evicting KV cache that leads to repetitive prefill or loading, or ignore the continuity of a multi-turn program, creating waiting time between turns that increases per-request latency. We present Continuum, a serving system to optimize job completion time for multi-turn agent workloads by combining tool-aware KV cache timeout with program-level scheduling. By predicting tool call durations in agentic workflows, Continuum selectively pins the KV cache in GPU memory with a time-to-live value based on total turn number. When combined with program-level first-come-first-serve, Continuum prevents scheduling bubbles, preserves multi-turn continuity, and optimizes for throughput for complex agentic workflows. By modeling the variability of tool call and agent program continuity, Continuum outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our evaluation on real-world agentic workloads (SWE-Bench and BFCL) with Llama-3.1 8B/70B models shows that Continuum significantly improves the average job completion times, and remains performant across different hardware setups and DRAM offloading schemes. Preview code is available at: https://github.com/Hanchenli/vllm-continuum

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 3, 2025

SAGA: Workflow-Atomic Scheduling for AI Agent Inference on GPU Clusters

AI agents execute tens to hundreds of chained LLM calls per task, yet GPU schedulers treat each call as independent, discarding gigabytes of intermediate state between steps and inflating end-to-end latency by 3-8x. We argue that this request-level abstraction is fundamentally mismatched to compound AI workloads, and propose a shift to program-level scheduling: treating the entire agent workflow (not individual inference calls) as the first-class schedulable unit. We present SAGA, a distributed scheduler that implements this abstraction through three mechanisms: (1) Agent Execution Graphs that capture workflow structure to predict KV cache reuse across tool-call boundaries, achieving within 1.31x of Bélády's optimal offline policy; (2) session-affinity batching with work stealing that co-locates correlated requests while maintaining global load balance; and (3) Agent Fair Share, a task-completion-time fairness metric with provable bounded-deviation guarantees. On a 64-GPU cluster serving SWE-bench coding agents and WebArena browser tasks, SAGA reduces task completion time by 1.64x (geometric mean, p < 0.001) over vLLM v0.15.1 with prefix caching and affinity routing, while improving GPU memory utilization by 1.22x and achieving 99.2% SLO attainment under multi-tenant interference. These latency gains come at a quantified cost: approximately 30% lower peak throughput than throughput-optimal batch scheduling, a tradeoff appropriate for the latency-sensitive interactive deployments that dominate compound AI usage. Our results demonstrate that workflow-aware scheduling is essential for efficient compound AI serving.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 30

ACID: Adaptive Caching for vIDeo generation

Video diffusion models produce high-quality generations but remain slow at inference due to their sequential denoising procedure. Caching-based acceleration methods address this by reusing intermediate model outputs: leading dynamic approaches such as TeaCache, EasyCache, and DiCache accumulate a drift signal and skip expensive model evaluations when accumulated drift stays below a fixed threshold τ. This threshold controls an apparent tradeoff - raising it yields faster generation at the cost of visual quality, while lowering it preserves quality but sacrifices speed. We show this tradeoff is not fundamental; it is an artifact of holding τ constant throughout denoising. We identify the existence of critical steps - timesteps where the drift signal changes rapidly - and show that applying a low threshold selectively at these steps while caching aggressively elsewhere recovers most of the quality of conservative caching at substantially higher inference speeds. Building on this insight, we propose ACID, a lightweight, training-free wrapper that monitors the rate of change of each method's existing drift signal to dynamically switch between a low and a high threshold. ACID is signal-agnostic and modular: it requires no retraining and plugs directly into existing dynamic caching methods without modifying their core mechanisms. Evaluated across three caching methods (TeaCache, EasyCache, DiCache) and three open-source video diffusion models (HunyuanVideo, Wan 2.1, CogVideoX), ACID consistently expands the Pareto frontier of visual quality versus inference speed beyond what any fixed threshold achieves. In particular, on TeaCache and HunyuanVideo, ACID achieves up to 2.16x speedup over the no-caching baseline, and up to 38% additional speedup over the conservative fixed-threshold baseline with negligible (<0.3 dB PSNR, <0.01 SSIM, <0.01 LPIPS) quality degradation.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 15

Depth Jitter: Seeing through the Depth

Depth information is essential in computer vision, particularly in underwater imaging, robotics, and autonomous navigation. However, conventional augmentation techniques overlook depth aware transformations, limiting model robustness in real world depth variations. In this paper, we introduce Depth-Jitter, a novel depth-based augmentation technique that simulates natural depth variations to improve generalization. Our approach applies adaptive depth offsetting, guided by depth variance thresholds, to generate synthetic depth perturbations while preserving structural integrity. We evaluate Depth-Jitter on two benchmark datasets, FathomNet and UTDAC2020 demonstrating its impact on model stability under diverse depth conditions. Extensive experiments compare Depth-Jitter against traditional augmentation strategies such as ColorJitter, analyzing performance across varying learning rates, encoders, and loss functions. While Depth-Jitter does not always outperform conventional methods in absolute performance, it consistently enhances model stability and generalization in depth-sensitive environments. These findings highlight the potential of depth-aware augmentation for real-world applications and provide a foundation for further research into depth-based learning strategies. The proposed technique is publicly available to support advancements in depth-aware augmentation. The code is publicly available on https://github.com/mim-team/Depth-Jitter{github}.

UTLN Université de Toulon
·
Aug 7, 2025 2

Anchor Forcing: Anchor Memory and Tri-Region RoPE for Interactive Streaming Video Diffusion

Interactive long video generation requires prompt switching to introduce new subjects or events, while maintaining perceptual fidelity and coherent motion over extended horizons. Recent distilled streaming video diffusion models reuse a rolling KV cache for long-range generation, enabling prompt-switch interaction through re-cache at each switch. However, existing streaming methods still exhibit progressive quality degradation and weakened motion dynamics. We identify two failure modes specific to interactive streaming generation: (i) at each prompt switch, current cache maintenance cannot simultaneously retain KV-based semantic context and recent latent cues, resulting in weak boundary conditioning and reduced perceptual quality; and (ii) during distillation, unbounded time indexing induces a positional distribution shift from the pretrained backbone's bounded RoPE regime, weakening pretrained motion priors and long-horizon motion retention. To address these issues, we propose Anchor Forcing, a cache-centric framework with two designs. First, an anchor-guided re-cache mechanism stores KV states in anchor caches and warm-starts re-cache from these anchors at each prompt switch, reducing post-switch evidence loss and stabilizing perceptual quality. Second, a tri-region RoPE with region-specific reference origins, together with RoPE re-alignment distillation, reconciles unbounded streaming indices with the pretrained RoPE regime to better retain motion priors. Experiments on long videos show that our method improves perceptual quality and motion metrics over prior streaming baselines in interactive settings. Project page: https://github.com/vivoCameraResearch/Anchor-Forcing

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 12