AirCache: Activating Inter-modal Relevancy KV Cache Compression for Efficient Large Vision-Language Model Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Kai, Zou, Hao, Wang, Bochen, Xi, Ye, Xie, Zhen, Wang, Hao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866916857788760064
author Huang, Kai
Zou, Hao
Wang, Bochen
Xi, Ye
Xie, Zhen
Wang, Hao
author_facet Huang, Kai
Zou, Hao
Wang, Bochen
Xi, Ye
Xie, Zhen
Wang, Hao
contents Recent advancements in Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) have gained significant attention due to their remarkable reasoning capabilities and proficiency in generalization. However, processing a large number of visual tokens and generating long-context outputs impose substantial computational overhead, leading to excessive demands for key-value (KV) cache. To address this critical bottleneck, we propose AirCache, a novel KV cache compression method aimed at accelerating LVLMs inference. This work systematically investigates the correlations between visual and textual tokens within the attention mechanisms of LVLMs. Our empirical analysis reveals considerable redundancy in cached visual tokens, wherein strategically eliminating these tokens preserves model performance while significantly accelerating context generation. Inspired by these findings, we introduce an elite observation window for assessing the importance of visual components in the KV cache, focusing on stable inter-modal relevancy modeling with enhanced multi-perspective consistency. Additionally, we develop an adaptive layer-wise budget allocation strategy that capitalizes on the strength and skewness of token importance distribution, showcasing superior efficiency compared to uniform allocation. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple LVLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance to the full cache while retaining only 10% of visual KV cache, thereby reducing decoding latency by 29% to 66% across various batch size and prompt length of inputs. Notably, as cache retention rates decrease, our method exhibits increasing performance advantages over existing approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23956
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AirCache: Activating Inter-modal Relevancy KV Cache Compression for Efficient Large Vision-Language Model Inference
Huang, Kai
Zou, Hao
Wang, Bochen
Xi, Ye
Xie, Zhen
Wang, Hao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advancements in Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) have gained significant attention due to their remarkable reasoning capabilities and proficiency in generalization. However, processing a large number of visual tokens and generating long-context outputs impose substantial computational overhead, leading to excessive demands for key-value (KV) cache. To address this critical bottleneck, we propose AirCache, a novel KV cache compression method aimed at accelerating LVLMs inference. This work systematically investigates the correlations between visual and textual tokens within the attention mechanisms of LVLMs. Our empirical analysis reveals considerable redundancy in cached visual tokens, wherein strategically eliminating these tokens preserves model performance while significantly accelerating context generation. Inspired by these findings, we introduce an elite observation window for assessing the importance of visual components in the KV cache, focusing on stable inter-modal relevancy modeling with enhanced multi-perspective consistency. Additionally, we develop an adaptive layer-wise budget allocation strategy that capitalizes on the strength and skewness of token importance distribution, showcasing superior efficiency compared to uniform allocation. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple LVLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance to the full cache while retaining only 10% of visual KV cache, thereby reducing decoding latency by 29% to 66% across various batch size and prompt length of inputs. Notably, as cache retention rates decrease, our method exhibits increasing performance advantages over existing approaches.
title AirCache: Activating Inter-modal Relevancy KV Cache Compression for Efficient Large Vision-Language Model Inference
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23956