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Main Authors: Wang, Tuowei, Zhou, He, Song, Chengru, Li, Qiushi, Ren, Ju
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10060
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_version_ 1866918439553073152
author Wang, Tuowei
Zhou, He
Song, Chengru
Li, Qiushi
Ren, Ju
author_facet Wang, Tuowei
Zhou, He
Song, Chengru
Li, Qiushi
Ren, Ju
contents Large vision-language models (VLMs) are enabling interactive video reasoning, giving rise to streaming long-video understanding. In this setting, frames arrive continuously, while the system preserves long-term context and generates responses under strict latency constraints. A central challenge is KVCache management: as video streams grow, KVCache expands rapidly, increasing computation and memory overhead. Existing retrieval-based approaches exploit attention sparsity and offload inactive KVCache from GPU to CPU memory, but their token-level design causes high management overhead and fragmented data movement. We present Mosaic, the first cluster-driven VLM inference system for streaming long-video understanding. Our key insight is that VLM KVCache exhibits an implicit cross-modal clustering structure: retrieved KV states form groups jointly shaped by visual coherence and semantic relevance. Based on this observation, Mosaic uses cross-modal clusters as the basic unit of KVCache organization, maintenance, and retrieval. Evaluations show that Mosaic outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 1.38x speedup.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_10060
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mosaic: Cross-Modal Clustering for Efficient Video Understanding
Wang, Tuowei
Zhou, He
Song, Chengru
Li, Qiushi
Ren, Ju
Performance
Large vision-language models (VLMs) are enabling interactive video reasoning, giving rise to streaming long-video understanding. In this setting, frames arrive continuously, while the system preserves long-term context and generates responses under strict latency constraints. A central challenge is KVCache management: as video streams grow, KVCache expands rapidly, increasing computation and memory overhead. Existing retrieval-based approaches exploit attention sparsity and offload inactive KVCache from GPU to CPU memory, but their token-level design causes high management overhead and fragmented data movement. We present Mosaic, the first cluster-driven VLM inference system for streaming long-video understanding. Our key insight is that VLM KVCache exhibits an implicit cross-modal clustering structure: retrieved KV states form groups jointly shaped by visual coherence and semantic relevance. Based on this observation, Mosaic uses cross-modal clusters as the basic unit of KVCache organization, maintenance, and retrieval. Evaluations show that Mosaic outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 1.38x speedup.
title Mosaic: Cross-Modal Clustering for Efficient Video Understanding
topic Performance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10060