MEDA: Dynamic KV Cache Allocation for Efficient Multimodal Long-Context Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wan, Zhongwei, Shen, Hui, Wang, Xin, Liu, Che, Mai, Zheda, Zhang, Mi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Wan, Zhongwei
Shen, Hui
Wang, Xin
Liu, Che
Mai, Zheda
Zhang, Mi
author_facet Wan, Zhongwei
Shen, Hui
Wang, Xin
Liu, Che
Mai, Zheda
Zhang, Mi
contents Long-context Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that incorporate long text-image and text-video modalities, demand substantial resources as their multimodal Key-Value (KV) caches grow with increasing input lengths, challenging inference efficiency. Existing methods for KV cache compression, in both text-only and multimodal LLMs, have neglected attention density variations across layers, thus often adopting uniform or progressive reduction strategies for layer-wise cache allocation. In this work, we propose MEDA, a dynamic layer-wise KV cache allocation method for efficient multimodal long-context inference. As its core, MEDA utilizes cross-modal attention entropy to determine the KV cache size at each MLLMs layer. Given the dynamically allocated KV cache size at each layer, MEDA also employs a KV pair selection scheme to identify which KV pairs to select and a KV pair merging strategy that merges the selected and non-selected ones to preserve information from the entire context. MEDA achieves up to 72% KV cache memory reduction and 2.82 times faster decoding speed, while maintaining or enhancing performance on various multimodal tasks in long-context settings, including multi-images and long-video scenarios. Our code is released at https://github.com/AIoT-MLSys-Lab/MEDA.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17599
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MEDA: Dynamic KV Cache Allocation for Efficient Multimodal Long-Context Inference
Wan, Zhongwei
Shen, Hui
Wang, Xin
Liu, Che
Mai, Zheda
Zhang, Mi
Computation and Language
Long-context Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that incorporate long text-image and text-video modalities, demand substantial resources as their multimodal Key-Value (KV) caches grow with increasing input lengths, challenging inference efficiency. Existing methods for KV cache compression, in both text-only and multimodal LLMs, have neglected attention density variations across layers, thus often adopting uniform or progressive reduction strategies for layer-wise cache allocation. In this work, we propose MEDA, a dynamic layer-wise KV cache allocation method for efficient multimodal long-context inference. As its core, MEDA utilizes cross-modal attention entropy to determine the KV cache size at each MLLMs layer. Given the dynamically allocated KV cache size at each layer, MEDA also employs a KV pair selection scheme to identify which KV pairs to select and a KV pair merging strategy that merges the selected and non-selected ones to preserve information from the entire context. MEDA achieves up to 72% KV cache memory reduction and 2.82 times faster decoding speed, while maintaining or enhancing performance on various multimodal tasks in long-context settings, including multi-images and long-video scenarios. Our code is released at https://github.com/AIoT-MLSys-Lab/MEDA.
title MEDA: Dynamic KV Cache Allocation for Efficient Multimodal Long-Context Inference
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17599