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Oct 5

DisCa: Accelerating Video Diffusion Transformers with Distillation-Compatible Learnable Feature Caching

While diffusion models have achieved great success in the field of video generation, this progress is accompanied by a rapidly escalating computational burden. Among the existing acceleration methods, Feature Caching is popular due to its training-free property and considerable speedup performance, but it inevitably faces semantic and detail drop with further compression. Another widely adopted method, training-aware step-distillation, though successful in image generation, also faces drastic degradation in video generation with a few steps. Furthermore, the quality loss becomes more severe when simply applying training-free feature caching to the step-distilled models, due to the sparser sampling steps. This paper novelly introduces a distillation-compatible learnable feature caching mechanism for the first time. We employ a lightweight learnable neural predictor instead of traditional training-free heuristics for diffusion models, enabling a more accurate capture of the high-dimensional feature evolution process. Furthermore, we explore the challenges of highly compressed distillation on large-scale video models and propose a conservative Restricted MeanFlow approach to achieve more stable and lossless distillation. By undertaking these initiatives, we further push the acceleration boundaries to 11.8times while preserving generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code will be made publicly available soon.

  • 10 authors
·
Feb 5

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

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

WorldCache: Accelerating World Models for Free via Heterogeneous Token Caching

Diffusion-based world models have shown strong potential for unified world simulation, but the iterative denoising remains too costly for interactive use and long-horizon rollouts. While feature caching can accelerate inference without training, we find that policies designed for single-modal diffusion transfer poorly to world models due to two world-model-specific obstacles: token heterogeneity from multi-modal coupling and spatial variation, and non-uniform temporal dynamics where a small set of hard tokens drives error growth, making uniform skipping either unstable or overly conservative. We propose WorldCache, a caching framework tailored to diffusion world models. We introduce Curvature-guided Heterogeneous Token Prediction, which uses a physics-grounded curvature score to estimate token predictability and applies a Hermite-guided damped predictor for chaotic tokens with abrupt direction changes. We also design Chaotic-prioritized Adaptive Skipping, which accumulates a curvature-normalized, dimensionless drift signal and recomputes only when bottleneck tokens begin to drift. Experiments on diffusion world models show that WorldCache delivers up to 3.7times end-to-end speedups while maintaining 98\% rollout quality, demonstrating the vast advantages and practicality of WorldCache in resource-constrained scenarios. Our code is released in https://github.com/FofGofx/WorldCache.

  • 13 authors
·
Mar 6 3

Adaptive Spectral Feature Forecasting for Diffusion Sampling Acceleration

Diffusion models have become the dominant tool for high-fidelity image and video generation, yet are critically bottlenecked by their inference speed due to the numerous iterative passes of Diffusion Transformers. To reduce the exhaustive compute, recent works resort to the feature caching and reusing scheme that skips network evaluations at selected diffusion steps by using cached features in previous steps. However, their preliminary design solely relies on local approximation, causing errors to grow rapidly with large skips and leading to degraded sample quality at high speedups. In this work, we propose spectral diffusion feature forecaster (Spectrum), a training-free approach that enables global, long-range feature reuse with tightly controlled error. In particular, we view the latent features of the denoiser as functions over time and approximate them with Chebyshev polynomials. Specifically, we fit the coefficient for each basis via ridge regression, which is then leveraged to forecast features at multiple future diffusion steps. We theoretically reveal that our approach admits more favorable long-horizon behavior and yields an error bound that does not compound with the step size. Extensive experiments on various state-of-the-art image and video diffusion models consistently verify the superiority of our approach. Notably, we achieve up to 4.79times speedup on FLUX.1 and 4.67times speedup on Wan2.1-14B, while maintaining much higher sample quality compared with the baselines.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 1

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

LESA: Learnable Stage-Aware Predictors for Diffusion Model Acceleration

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image and video generation tasks. However, the high computational demands of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) pose a significant challenge to their practical deployment. While feature caching is a promising acceleration strategy, existing methods based on simple reusing or training-free forecasting struggle to adapt to the complex, stage-dependent dynamics of the diffusion process, often resulting in quality degradation and failing to maintain consistency with the standard denoising process. To address this, we propose a LEarnable Stage-Aware (LESA) predictor framework based on two-stage training. Our approach leverages a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) to accurately learn temporal feature mappings from data. We further introduce a multi-stage, multi-expert architecture that assigns specialized predictors to different noise-level stages, enabling more precise and robust feature forecasting. Extensive experiments show our method achieves significant acceleration while maintaining high-fidelity generation. Experiments demonstrate 5.00x acceleration on FLUX.1-dev with minimal quality degradation (1.0% drop), 6.25x speedup on Qwen-Image with a 20.2% quality improvement over the previous SOTA (TaylorSeer), and 5.00x acceleration on HunyuanVideo with a 24.7% PSNR improvement over TaylorSeer. State-of-the-art performance on both text-to-image and text-to-video synthesis validates the effectiveness and generalization capability of our training-based framework across different models. Our code is included in the supplementary materials and will be released on GitHub.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 23

TemporalFlow-VLA: Learning Physically Grounded Execution History for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation

Vision-language-action (VLA) models leverage pretrained vision-language representations for robot control, yet simply adding historical frames does not reliably capture recent physical change. This is especially problematic in multi-stage manipulation, where visually similar states may require different actions depending on prior execution. To address this challenge, we present TemporalFlow-VLA, which learns compact execution history through physically grounded temporal supervision. Using recorded robot states, robot geometry, and calibrated cameras, we construct robot-surface temporal flow as a training-only target and supervise two execution-aligned temporal queries that provide structured history to the action expert. The geometric supervision path is not evaluated at deployment. TemporalFlow-VLA achieves 97.63 +/- 0.26% average success on LIBERO, including 96.60 +/- 0.87% on LIBERO Long, and 85.5%/84.2% Clean/Randomized success across 12 RoboTwin tasks. It shows its clearest advantage over prior methods on longer-horizon, multi-stage manipulation. Controlled history interventions show that action prediction depends on both historical content and temporal order. With asynchronous feature caching, temporal conditioning maintains single-frame-level server-side sampling latency without additional historical-encoding overhead. Overall, TemporalFlow-VLA provides a compact, physically grounded interface for exploiting ordered execution history without explicit motion estimation or geometric processing at deployment.

  • 12 authors
·
Aug 26

From Reusing to Forecasting: Accelerating Diffusion Models with TaylorSeers

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have revolutionized high-fidelity image and video synthesis, yet their computational demands remain prohibitive for real-time applications. To solve this problem, feature caching has been proposed to accelerate diffusion models by caching the features in the previous timesteps and then reusing them in the following timesteps. However, at timesteps with significant intervals, the feature similarity in diffusion models decreases substantially, leading to a pronounced increase in errors introduced by feature caching, significantly harming the generation quality. To solve this problem, we propose TaylorSeer, which firstly shows that features of diffusion models at future timesteps can be predicted based on their values at previous timesteps. Based on the fact that features change slowly and continuously across timesteps, TaylorSeer employs a differential method to approximate the higher-order derivatives of features and predict features in future timesteps with Taylor series expansion. Extensive experiments demonstrate its significant effectiveness in both image and video synthesis, especially in high acceleration ratios. For instance, it achieves an almost lossless acceleration of 4.99times on FLUX and 5.00times on HunyuanVideo without additional training. On DiT, it achieves 3.41 lower FID compared with previous SOTA at 4.53times acceleration. %Our code is provided in the supplementary materials and will be made publicly available on GitHub. Our codes have been released in Github:https://github.com/Shenyi-Z/TaylorSeer

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

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

Elastic Diffusion Transformer

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have demonstrated remarkable generative capabilities but remain highly computationally expensive. Previous acceleration methods, such as pruning and distillation, typically rely on a fixed computational capacity, leading to insufficient acceleration and degraded generation quality. To address this limitation, we propose Elastic Diffusion Transformer (E-DiT), an adaptive acceleration framework for DiT that effectively improves efficiency while maintaining generation quality. Specifically, we observe that the generative process of DiT exhibits substantial sparsity (i.e., some computations can be skipped with minimal impact on quality), and this sparsity varies significantly across samples. Motivated by this observation, E-DiT equips each DiT block with a lightweight router that dynamically identifies sample-dependent sparsity from the input latent. Each router adaptively determines whether the corresponding block can be skipped. If the block is not skipped, the router then predicts the optimal MLP width reduction ratio within the block. During inference, we further introduce a block-level feature caching mechanism that leverages router predictions to eliminate redundant computations in a training-free manner. Extensive experiments across 2D image (Qwen-Image and FLUX) and 3D asset (Hunyuan3D-3.0) demonstrate the effectiveness of E-DiT, achieving up to sim2times speedup with negligible loss in generation quality. Code will be available at https://github.com/wangjiangshan0725/Elastic-DiT.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 15

Multi-Resolution Flow Matching: Training-Free Diffusion Acceleration via Staged Sampling

Hardware-agnostic strategies for accelerating text-to-image diffusion, such as timestep distillation and feature caching, can reduce inference time without custom kernels or system-level optimization. Among them, multi-resolution generation strategies have recently received broad attention, attaining more than 5x speedup without any training. However, the design of performing upsampling in the latent space, together with the selective modification of partial regions, causes these methods to exhibit noticeable blurring or artifacts. To this end, we propose MrFlow, a training-free multi-resolution acceleration strategy for pretrained flow-matching models built upon a staged low-to-high-resolution pipeline. MrFlow first rapidly generates the main structure at low resolution, then performs super-resolution in the pixel space using a lightweight pretrained GAN-based model, subsequently injects low-strength noise to enable high-frequency resampling, and finally refines the details at high resolution. Quantitative and qualitative results on FLUX.1-dev and Qwen-Image show that MrFlow exploits the quadratic token reduction and reduced step requirement of low-resolution sampling to achieve 10x end-to-end acceleration while keeping OneIG within a 1% gap relative to that before acceleration, significantly surpassing other training-free acceleration strategies, and requiring no training or runtime dynamic identification whatsoever. MrFlow can further be directly combined orthogonally with pre-trained timestep distillation strategies, achieving even higher generation acceleration of up to 25x.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 1 2

Rethinking Video Tokenization: A Conditioned Diffusion-based Approach

Existing video tokenizers typically use the traditional Variational Autoencoder (VAE) architecture for video compression and reconstruction. However, to achieve good performance, its training process often relies on complex multi-stage training tricks that go beyond basic reconstruction loss and KL regularization. Among these tricks, the most challenging is the precise tuning of adversarial training with additional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in the final stage, which can hinder stable convergence. In contrast to GANs, diffusion models offer more stable training processes and can generate higher-quality results. Inspired by these advantages, we propose CDT, a novel Conditioned Diffusion-based video Tokenizer, that replaces the GAN-based decoder with a conditional causal diffusion model. The encoder compresses spatio-temporal information into compact latents, while the decoder reconstructs videos through a reverse diffusion process conditioned on these latents. During inference, we incorporate a feature cache mechanism to generate videos of arbitrary length while maintaining temporal continuity and adopt sampling acceleration technique to enhance efficiency. Trained using only a basic MSE diffusion loss for reconstruction, along with KL term and LPIPS perceptual loss from scratch, extensive experiments demonstrate that CDT achieves state-of-the-art performance in video reconstruction tasks with just a single-step sampling. Even a scaled-down version of CDT (3times inference speedup) still performs comparably with top baselines. Moreover, the latent video generation model trained with CDT also exhibits superior performance. The source code and pretrained weights will be released shortly, so please stay tuned for updates!

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 5, 2025

DiffSparse: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Learned Token Sparsity

Diffusion models demonstrate outstanding performance in image generation, but their multi-step inference mechanism requires immense computational cost. Previous works accelerate inference by leveraging layer or token cache techniques to reduce computational cost. However, these methods fail to achieve superior acceleration performance in few-step diffusion transformer models due to inefficient feature caching strategies, manually designed sparsity allocation, and the practice of retaining complete forward computations in several steps in these token cache methods. To tackle these challenges, we propose a differentiable layer-wise sparsity optimization framework for diffusion transformer models, leveraging token caching to reduce token computation costs and enhance acceleration. Our method optimizes layer-wise sparsity allocation in an end-to-end manner through a learnable network combined with a dynamic programming solver. Additionally, our proposed two-stage training strategy eliminates the need for full-step processing in existing methods, further improving efficiency. We conducted extensive experiments on a range of diffusion-transformer models, including DiT-XL/2, PixArt-α, FLUX, and Wan2.1. Across these architectures, our method consistently improves efficiency without degrading sample quality. For example, on PixArt-α with 20 sampling steps, we reduce computational cost by 54% while achieving generation metrics that surpass those of the original model, substantially outperforming prior approaches. These results demonstrate that our method delivers large efficiency gains while often improving generation quality.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 3

Training-Free Unsupervised Prompt for Vision-Language Models

Prompt learning has become the most effective paradigm for adapting large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. Recently, unsupervised prompt tuning methods, such as UPL and POUF, directly leverage pseudo-labels as supervisory information to fine-tune additional adaptation modules on unlabeled data. However, inaccurate pseudo labels easily misguide the tuning process and result in poor representation capabilities. In light of this, we propose Training-Free Unsupervised Prompts (TFUP), which maximally preserves the inherent representation capabilities and enhances them with a residual connection to similarity-based prediction probabilities in a training-free and labeling-free manner. Specifically, we integrate both instance confidence and prototype scores to select representative samples, which are used to customize a reliable Feature Cache Model (FCM) for training-free inference. Then, we design a Multi-level Similarity Measure (MSM) that considers both feature-level and semantic-level similarities to calculate the distance between each test image and the cached sample as the weight of the corresponding cached label to generate similarity-based prediction probabilities. In this way, TFUP achieves surprising performance, even surpassing the training-base method on multiple classification datasets. Based on our TFUP, we propose a training-based approach (TFUP-T) to further boost the adaptation performance. In addition to the standard cross-entropy loss, TFUP-T adopts an additional marginal distribution entropy loss to constrain the model from a global perspective. Our TFUP-T achieves new state-of-the-art classification performance compared to unsupervised and few-shot adaptation approaches on multiple benchmarks. In particular, TFUP-T improves the classification accuracy of POUF by 3.3% on the most challenging Domain-Net dataset.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 25, 2024

FADA: Accessible fetal ultrasound interpretation and annotation with a selectively distilled unified vision-language model

A global shortage of trained sonographers limits prenatal ultrasound screening in low- and middle-income countries, where over half of pregnant women receive no skilled sonography. Current deep learning approaches address detection, segmentation, or classification in isolation, each demanding a separate model and expert-specified labels at inference. We present FADA, a unified vision-language model built on Qwen3.5-VL that performs clinical interpretation, classification, detection, and segmentation through a single interpretation-first pipeline without external labels. FADA distills knowledge from four domain-specific foundation models (FetalCLIP, UltraSAM, USF-MAE, UltraFedFM) via offline pre-computed feature caching. Selective distillation, which applies feature alignment only to annotation tasks while interpretation relies on standard fine-tuning, consistently outperforms full distillation across most evaluation axes. The recommended variant, FADA-SKD, achieves 0.8820 mean Dice for segmentation, 0.7671 mAP@0.50 for detection, and 100% structured interpretation compliance. Expert sonographer validation across 237 images confirms clinically acceptable outputs in both autonomous and human-in-the-loop modes, with 73.5% of interpretations scoring perfectly under clinician guidance. The system is trainable on a single consumer GPU and deployable without cloud connectivity. We validate edge deployment by running the compressed 0.8B model on a commodity smartphone (Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, 12 GB RAM) using llama.cpp with GGUF quantization, completing the full 5-phase pipeline in approximately 60 seconds entirely offline. This establishes a practical pathway for integrating AI-assisted fetal assessment with portable ultrasound devices, directly addressing diagnostic access gaps in resource-constrained settings. Code, models, and data are available at https://github.com/mahmoodphd/FADA.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 9

HarmoniCa: Harmonizing Training and Inference for Better Feature Cache in Diffusion Transformer Acceleration

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have gained prominence for outstanding scalability and extraordinary performance in generative tasks. However, their considerable inference costs impede practical deployment. The feature cache mechanism, which involves storing and retrieving redundant computations across timesteps, holds promise for reducing per-step inference time in diffusion models. Most existing caching methods for DiT are manually designed. Although the learning-based approach attempts to optimize strategies adaptively, it suffers from discrepancies between training and inference, which hampers both the performance and acceleration ratio. Upon detailed analysis, we pinpoint that these discrepancies primarily stem from two aspects: (1) Prior Timestep Disregard, where training ignores the effect of cache usage at earlier timesteps, and (2) Objective Mismatch, where the training target (align predicted noise in each timestep) deviates from the goal of inference (generate the high-quality image). To alleviate these discrepancies, we propose HarmoniCa, a novel method that Harmonizes training and inference with a novel learning-based Caching framework built upon Step-Wise Denoising Training (SDT) and Image Error Proxy-Guided Objective (IEPO). Compared to the traditional training paradigm, the newly proposed SDT maintains the continuity of the denoising process, enabling the model to leverage information from prior timesteps during training, similar to the way it operates during inference. Furthermore, we design IEPO, which integrates an efficient proxy mechanism to approximate the final image error caused by reusing the cached feature. Therefore, IEPO helps balance final image quality and cache utilization, resolving the issue of training that only considers the impact of cache usage on the predicted output at each timestep.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024 2

Feature Coding in the Era of Large Models: Dataset, Test Conditions, and Benchmark

Large models have achieved remarkable performance across various tasks, yet they incur significant computational costs and privacy concerns during both training and inference. Distributed deployment has emerged as a potential solution, but it necessitates the exchange of intermediate information between model segments, with feature representations serving as crucial information carriers. To optimize information exchange, feature coding methods are applied to reduce transmission and storage overhead. Despite its importance, feature coding for large models remains an under-explored area. In this paper, we draw attention to large model feature coding and make three contributions to this field. First, we introduce a comprehensive dataset encompassing diverse features generated by three representative types of large models. Second, we establish unified test conditions, enabling standardized evaluation pipelines and fair comparisons across future feature coding studies. Third, we introduce two baseline methods derived from widely used image coding techniques and benchmark their performance on the proposed dataset. These contributions aim to advance the field of feature coding, facilitating more efficient large model deployment. All source code and the dataset are now available at https://github.com/chansongoal/FCM-LM/tree/master{https://github.com/chansongoal/FCM-LM/tree/master}.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024

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

MatryoshkaKV: Adaptive KV Compression via Trainable Orthogonal Projection

KV cache has become a de facto technique for the inference of large language models (LLMs), where tensors of shape (layer number, head number, sequence length, feature dimension) are introduced to cache historical information for self-attention. As the size of the model and data grows, the KV cache can quickly become a bottleneck within the system in both storage and memory transfer. To address this, prior studies usually focus on the first three axes of the cache tensors for compression. This paper supplements them, focusing on the feature dimension axis, by utilizing low-rank projection matrices to transform the cache features into spaces with reduced dimensions. We begin by investigating the canonical orthogonal projection method for data compression through principal component analysis (PCA). We observe the issue with PCA projection where significant performance degradation is observed at low compression rates. To bridge the gap, we propose to directly tune the orthogonal projection matrices with a distillation objective using an elaborate Matryoshka training strategy. After training, we adaptively search for the optimal compression rates for various layers and heads given varying compression budgets. Compared to previous works, our method can easily embrace pre-trained LLMs and hold a smooth tradeoff between performance and compression rate. We empirically witness the high data efficiency of our training procedure and find that our method can sustain over 90% performance with an average KV cache compression rate of 60% (and up to 75% in certain extreme scenarios) for popular LLMs like LLaMA2-7B-base and Mistral-7B-v0.3-base.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 16, 2024

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

LOCI: Spatial Linear Memory for Streaming World Models

When a camera revisits a previously observed region, a video world model should reproduce what was there before. This requires both remembering past observations and retrieving the right one for the current viewpoint. Key-value caches preserve visual detail but grow with video length; recurrent memory is compact but compresses history into a fixed-size state, so individual past observations are no longer directly accessible. We introduce LOCI, a hybrid spatial-memory architecture that keeps both representations. In half of the transformer blocks, main attention keeps a key-value cache of past observations; in the other half, it is restricted to the current chunk and complemented by a recurrent linear-attention memory whose reads and writes are conditioned on projective camera geometry, so viewpoint enters both memory addressing and stored content. Recurrent readouts flow into subsequent cache-backed blocks and supply their queries with accumulated scene context. On the public MIND memory benchmark and on held-out recorded trajectories, LOCI reproduces revisited content more faithfully than representative world models and a same-recipe full-softmax model; with full history, it lowers peak memory at equal length by about 30% relative to full softmax. With a bounded bank of retained observations, it streams long videos at constant memory and remains more faithful than full softmax under the same budget.

IC-Cache: Efficient Large Language Model Serving via In-context Caching

Large language models (LLMs) have excelled in various applications, yet serving them at scale is challenging due to their substantial resource demands and high latency. Our real-world studies reveal that over 70% of user requests to LLMs have semantically similar counterparts, suggesting the potential for knowledge transfer among requests. However, naively caching and reusing past responses leads to a big quality drop. In this paper, we introduce IC-Cache, a caching system that enables live LLM capability augmentation to improve serving efficiency: by leveraging historical request-response pairs from larger models as in-context examples, IC-Cache empowers small LLMs to imitate and even exceed the compositional abilities (e.g., reasoning) of their larger counterparts, enabling selective offloading of requests to reduce cost and latency. Achieving this live augmentation at scale introduces intricate trade-offs between response quality, latency, and system throughput. For a new request, IC-Cache efficiently selects similar, high-utility examples to prepend them to the new request's input. At scale, it adaptively routes requests across LLMs of varying capabilities, accounting for response quality and serving loads. IC-Cache employs a cost-aware cache replay mechanism that refines example quality offline to maximize online cache utility and efficiency. Evaluations on millions of realistic requests demonstrate that IC-Cache improves LLM serving throughput by 1.4-5.9x and reduces latency by 28-71% without hurting response quality.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 22, 2025

NaviCache: Test-Time Self-Calibration Caching for Video Generation

Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) is constrained by immense computational costs. While offline calibration-based acceleration suffers from calibration data dependency, prohibitive calibration duration, and susceptibility to distribution shifts, offline calibration-free methods eliminate these hurdles. However, since they rely on instantaneous zero-order approximations where the mapping between input and output differences varies in real-time, they are susceptible to observational noise and ignore the intrinsic momentum within the diffusion trajectory. In this paper, we propose NaviCache, a plug-and-play test-time self-calibration method re-conceptualizing feature evolution as an Inertial Navigation System (INS) problem. NaviCache bridges the fundamental domain gap and the non-stationary nature of diffusion by modeling the relative coupling between input and output variations. We introduce a dual-state estimation architecture that adaptively tracks the feature change ratio and its latent drift, initialized via a specialized Initial Alignment phase. By integrating a time-dependent noise schedule with an uncertainty-aware Measurement Update mechanism, NaviCache provides a theoretically grounded mechanism for error-bounded computation skipping. Extensive experiments on the HunyuanVideo, Wan, and Open-Sora series demonstrate that NaviCache exhibits more accurate error judgment for computation skipping and achieves outstanding comprehensive performance.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 10

Accelerating Diffusion-based Video Editing via Heterogeneous Caching: Beyond Full Computing at Sampled Denoising Timestep

Diffusion-based video editing has emerged as an important paradigm for high-quality and flexible content generation. However, despite their generality and strong modeling capacity, Diffusion Transformers (DiT) remain computationally expensive due to the iterative denoising process, posing challenges for practical deployment. Existing video diffusion acceleration methods primarily exploit denoising timestep-level feature reuse, which mitigates the redundancy in denoising process, but overlooks the architectural redundancy within the DiT that many attention operations over spatio-temporal tokens are redundantly executed, offering little to no incremental contribution to the model output. This work introduces HetCache, a training-free diffusion acceleration framework designed to exploit the inherent heterogeneity in diffusion-based masked video-to-video (MV2V) generation and editing. Instead of uniformly reuse or randomly sampling tokens, HetCache assesses the contextual relevance and interaction strength among various types of tokens in designated computing steps. Guided by spatial priors, it divides the spatial-temporal tokens in DiT model into context and generative tokens, and selectively caches the context tokens that exhibit the strongest correlation and most representative semantics with generative ones. This strategy reduces redundant attention operations while maintaining editing consistency and fidelity. Experiments show that HetCache achieves a noticeable acceleration, including a 2.67times latency speedup and FLOPs reduction over commonly used foundation models, with negligible degradation in editing quality.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 24

Temporal Feature Matters: A Framework for Diffusion Model Quantization

The Diffusion models, widely used for image generation, face significant challenges related to their broad applicability due to prolonged inference times and high memory demands. Efficient Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is crucial to address these issues. However, unlike traditional models, diffusion models critically rely on the time-step for the multi-round denoising. Typically, each time-step is encoded into a hypersensitive temporal feature by several modules. Despite this, existing PTQ methods do not optimize these modules individually. Instead, they employ unsuitable reconstruction objectives and complex calibration methods, leading to significant disturbances in the temporal feature and denoising trajectory, as well as reduced compression efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel quantization framework that includes three strategies: 1) TIB-based Maintenance: Based on our innovative Temporal Information Block (TIB) definition, Temporal Information-aware Reconstruction (TIAR) and Finite Set Calibration (FSC) are developed to efficiently align original temporal features. 2) Cache-based Maintenance: Instead of indirect and complex optimization for the related modules, pre-computing and caching quantized counterparts of temporal features are developed to minimize errors. 3) Disturbance-aware Selection: Employ temporal feature errors to guide a fine-grained selection between the two maintenance strategies for further disturbance reduction. This framework preserves most of the temporal information and ensures high-quality end-to-end generation. Extensive testing on various datasets, diffusion models and hardware confirms our superior performance and acceleration..

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 28, 2024

Denoising as Path Planning: Training-Free Acceleration of Diffusion Models with DPCache

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in image and video generation, yet their practical deployment remains hindered by the substantial computational overhead of multi-step iterative sampling. Among acceleration strategies, caching-based methods offer a training-free and effective solution by reusing or predicting features across timesteps. However, existing approaches rely on fixed or locally adaptive schedules without considering the global structure of the denoising trajectory, often leading to error accumulation and visual artifacts. To overcome this limitation, we propose DPCache, a novel training-free acceleration framework that formulates diffusion sampling acceleration as a global path planning problem. DPCache constructs a Path-Aware Cost Tensor from a small calibration set to quantify the path-dependent error of skipping timesteps conditioned on the preceding key timestep. Leveraging this tensor, DPCache employs dynamic programming to select an optimal sequence of key timesteps that minimizes the total path cost while preserving trajectory fidelity. During inference, the model performs full computations only at these key timesteps, while intermediate outputs are efficiently predicted using cached features. Extensive experiments on DiT, FLUX, and HunyuanVideo demonstrate that DPCache achieves strong acceleration with minimal quality loss, outperforming prior acceleration methods by +0.031 ImageReward at 4.87times speedup and even surpassing the full-step baseline by +0.028 ImageReward at 3.54times speedup on FLUX, validating the effectiveness of our path-aware global scheduling framework. Code is available at https://github.com/argsss/DPCache.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 5

Unveiling Redundancy in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs): A Systematic Study

The increased model capacity of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) and the demand for generating higher resolutions of images and videos have led to a significant rise in inference latency, impacting real-time performance adversely. While prior research has highlighted the presence of high similarity in activation values between adjacent diffusion steps (referred to as redundancy) and proposed various caching mechanisms to mitigate computational overhead, the exploration of redundancy in existing literature remains limited, with findings often not generalizable across different DiT models. This study aims to address this gap by conducting a comprehensive investigation into redundancy across a broad spectrum of mainstream DiT models. Our experimental analysis reveals substantial variations in the distribution of redundancy across diffusion steps among different DiT models. Interestingly, within a single model, the redundancy distribution remains stable regardless of variations in input prompts, step counts, or scheduling strategies. Given the lack of a consistent pattern across diverse models, caching strategies designed for a specific group of models may not easily transfer to others. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a tool for analyzing the redundancy of individual models, enabling subsequent research to develop tailored caching strategies for specific model architectures. The project is publicly available at https://github.com/xdit-project/DiTCacheAnalysis.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 17, 2024

RazorAttention: Efficient KV Cache Compression Through Retrieval Heads

The memory and computational demands of Key-Value (KV) cache present significant challenges for deploying long-context language models. Previous approaches attempt to mitigate this issue by selectively dropping tokens, which irreversibly erases critical information that might be needed for future queries. In this paper, we propose a novel compression technique for KV cache that preserves all token information. Our investigation reveals that: i) Most attention heads primarily focus on the local context; ii) Only a few heads, denoted as retrieval heads, can essentially pay attention to all input tokens. These key observations motivate us to use separate caching strategy for attention heads. Therefore, we propose RazorAttention, a training-free KV cache compression algorithm, which maintains a full cache for these crucial retrieval heads and discards the remote tokens in non-retrieval heads. Furthermore, we introduce a novel mechanism involving a "compensation token" to further recover the information in the dropped tokens. Extensive evaluations across a diverse set of large language models (LLMs) demonstrate that RazorAttention achieves a reduction in KV cache size by over 70% without noticeable impacts on performance. Additionally, RazorAttention is compatible with FlashAttention, rendering it an efficient and plug-and-play solution that enhances LLM inference efficiency without overhead or retraining of the original model.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 21, 2024 2

KEEP: A KV-Cache-Centric Memory Management System for Efficient Embodied Planning

Memory-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability for complex and long-horizon embodied planning. By keeping track of past experiences and environmental states, memory enables LLMs to maintain a global view, thereby avoiding repetitive exploration. However, existing approaches often store the memory as raw text, leading to excessively long prompts and high prefill latency. While it is possible to store and reuse the KV caches, the efficiency benefits are greatly undermined due to frequent KV cache updates. In this paper, we propose KEEP, a KV-cache-centric memory management system for efficient embodied planning. KEEP features 3 key innovations: (1) a Static-Dynamic Memory Construction algorithm that reduces KV cache recomputation by mixed-granularity memory group; (2) a Multi-hop Memory Re-computation algorithm that dynamically identifies important cross-attention among different memory groups and reconstructs memory interactions iteratively; (3) a Layer-balanced Memory Loading that eliminates unbalanced KV cache loading and cross-attention computation across different layers. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that KEEP achieves 2.68x speedup with negligible accuracy loss compared with text-based memory methods on ALFRED dataset. Compared with the KV re-computation method CacheBlend (EuroSys'25), KEEP shows 4.13% success rate improvement and 1.90x time-to-first-token (TTFT) reduction. Our code is available on https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/KEEP_Embodied_Memory.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 16

ATTUNER: Recomputation-Free KV Cache Reuse via Query-Side Adaptation

Large language model (LLM) agents repeatedly load reusable content, such as skills, documents, and memory entries, into the current context. Re-encoding this content for every request wastes computation. Position-independent caching (PIC) alleviates this by encoding each artifact independently and reusing its key-value (KV) states at arbitrary positions, but it incurs a quality loss relative to full-context prefill. Existing methods repair this loss by restoring global position IDs or recomputing selected tokens. In this work, we isolate the source of the loss, finding that the positional mismatch has minor effect, and independently cached artifacts retain faithful representations: reading a provided artifact stays largely accurate, and performance degrades only when the model must select among multiple artifacts. Moreover, replacing PIC's attention scores with full-prefill scores recovers performance with the cached KV unchanged, localizing the failure to the attention rather than KV recomputation. Motivated by this, we propose Attuner, a query-side adaptation method that learns to read a frozen artifact cache. Attuner inserts low-rank adapters into the query projections and is trained by distilling full-prefill distribution into the student. It trains fewer than 0.05\% of the model parameters and, at inference, requires neither cache recomputation nor a full-context reference. On Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B across seven benchmarks covering skills, documents, memory, and code, Attuner substantially outperforms prior PIC baselines in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, matches full-context prefill quality while providing up to 3.73times speedup.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 28

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

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.

Unified Embedding: Battle-Tested Feature Representations for Web-Scale ML Systems

Learning high-quality feature embeddings efficiently and effectively is critical for the performance of web-scale machine learning systems. A typical model ingests hundreds of features with vocabularies on the order of millions to billions of tokens. The standard approach is to represent each feature value as a d-dimensional embedding, introducing hundreds of billions of parameters for extremely high-cardinality features. This bottleneck has led to substantial progress in alternative embedding algorithms. Many of these methods, however, make the assumption that each feature uses an independent embedding table. This work introduces a simple yet highly effective framework, Feature Multiplexing, where one single representation space is used across many different categorical features. Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals that multiplexed embeddings can be decomposed into components from each constituent feature, allowing models to distinguish between features. We show that multiplexed representations lead to Pareto-optimal parameter-accuracy tradeoffs for three public benchmark datasets. Further, we propose a highly practical approach called Unified Embedding with three major benefits: simplified feature configuration, strong adaptation to dynamic data distributions, and compatibility with modern hardware. Unified embedding gives significant improvements in offline and online metrics compared to highly competitive baselines across five web-scale search, ads, and recommender systems, where it serves billions of users across the world in industry-leading products.

  • 7 authors
·
May 20, 2023

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

CacheGen: Fast Context Loading for Language Model Applications

As large language models (LLMs) take on more complex tasks, their inputs incorporate longer contexts to respond to questions that require domain knowledge or user-specific conversational histories. Yet, using long contexts poses a challenge for responsive LLM systems, as nothing can be generated until all the contexts are fetched to and processed by the LLM. Existing systems optimize only the computation delay in context processing (e.g., by caching intermediate key-value features of the text context) but often cause longer network delays in context fetching (e.g., key-value features consume orders of magnitude larger bandwidth than the text context). This paper presents CacheGen to minimize the delays in fetching and processing contexts for LLMs. CacheGen reduces the bandwidth needed for transmitting long contexts' key-value (KV) features through a novel encoder that compresses KV features into more compact bitstream representations. The encoder combines adaptive quantization with a tailored arithmetic coder, taking advantage of the KV features' distributional properties, such as locality across tokens. Furthermore, CacheGen minimizes the total delay in fetching and processing a context by using a controller that determines when to load the context as compressed KV features or raw text and picks the appropriate compression level if loaded as KV features. We test CacheGen on three models of various sizes and three datasets of different context lengths. Compared to recent methods that handle long contexts, CacheGen reduces bandwidth usage by 3.7-4.3x and the total delay in fetching and processing contexts by 2.7-3x while maintaining similar LLM performance on various tasks as loading the text contexts.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 11, 2023

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

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

WorldAttention: An Efficient Attention Architecture for Interactive Video World Models

Leveraging the paradigm of autoregressive diffusion, text-conditioned interactive video world models aim to simulate temporally coherent environments guided by textual instructions. While enabling low-latency, long-duration generation is pivotal for embodied AI and simulation-based planning, current frameworks primarily rely on sliding-window mechanisms to bound computational complexity. However, this approach inherently sacrifices historical context, undermining the long-range interactive capabilities. Conversely, maintaining a full-history cache remains computationally prohibitive and memory-intensive: the quadratic complexity of attention leads to excessive computational overhead, while the linear growth of the KV cache inevitably leads to GPU memory saturation. To overcome these limitations, we propose WorldAttention, a system-oriented attention architecture that achieves high efficiency through the co-design of specialized attention kernels and hierarchical KV cache management. First, we introduce Hybrid Sparse Attention (HSA), which integrates linear global attention supplemented with head-adaptive sparse attention. Additionally, we design a Hierarchical KV Cache (HKV) that organizes historical KV pairs into semantically indexed pages across multi-tier memory, enabling fine-grained retrieval and controlled GPU residency. These two designs are supported by tailored kernels to effectively translate their theoretical efficiency into real-world performance. Extensive experiments on VBench-Long and InterVBench demonstrate that WorldAttention consistently surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods, achieving subject consistency scores of 0.9472 on VBench-Long and 0.9668 on InterVBench, respectively.

Alibaba-DAMO-Academy DAMO Academy
·
Sep 27 2

Prompt Generation Technical Report

Generative retrieval has become an increasingly adopted paradigm for industrial search, recommendation, and advertising systems, delivering significant online gains. Most existing work combines user behavior sequences with large language models (LLMs) to model user preferences. In practice, feature engineering remains critical to model effectiveness, yet its complexity slows offline iteration and makes online deployment heavy and hard to reuse, all under tight online latency budgets. The root cause is a tight coupling between feature-processing logic and model architecture, where every feature change touches the training and serving code and resists reuse across scenarios. To break this coupling, we present Prompt Generation (PG), a high-level tokenizer and configuration-driven framework that decouples feature-processing logic from model architecture through two declarative JSON files, which serve as the single source of truth for both offline training and online serving, ensuring feature consistency across the two stages. Organizing features under four types with three composable processing components to assemble and compress heterogeneous features, PG delivers acceleration at three levels: (1)fast training iteration: feature experiments require only configuration changes, with built-in token compression for ultra-long sequences; (2)fast deployment: a new scenario only needs to conform to the PG schema and plug into a universal pipeline, with no scenario-specific engineering; (3)fast online inference: engine applies unified optimizations over the standardized configuration, reducing PG's overhead to a negligible level. PG has been deployed on Taobao Search with statistically significant online A/B uplifts of +0.47% in transaction count and +0.51% in GMV, and has been applied across multiple Taobao search and recommendation teams as the iteration framework for generative retrieval.

  • 28 authors
·
Jul 12

CacheReforge: Bounded Recovery for Stale KV Caches under Evolving Adapters

Large language models rely on KV caching to reduce repeated prefill computation in long context and interactive applications. As lightweight adapters evolve, cached states reflect earlier versions, so stale reuse distorts current model outputs, while complete affected suffix recomputation restores fidelity at substantial cost. We seek minimal recomputation that recovers current adapter behavior. Existing systems track token, context, or stable adapter identity, but neither represent caches from earlier adapter versions nor distinguish update propagation from the recomputation required for behavioral recovery. To address these gaps, we introduce CacheReforge, which represents stale KV caches as layerwise mixed-version objects. It combines per-layer adapter anchors, calibrated sensitivity, accumulated drift, and executable restart boundaries to select direct reuse, bounded recomputation, or complete affected-suffix recovery. We distinguish dependency depth from the functional recomputation horizon and use cumulative tail influence to characterize when bounded recovery preserves current-model behavior. We evaluate CacheReforge on Qwen2.5-1.5B and Qwen2.5-7B with continual LoRA updates, including 16K HotpotQA and 2WikiMQA workloads. CacheReforge reduces mean KL divergence by 92.4% relative to stale reuse, while recomputing only 5.44% of layers and reducing cache-maintenance time by 93.2% relative to fresh full prefill. These results show that version-aware recovery preserves model fidelity and most KV caching gains.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 24

The Evolution of Attention in Large Language Models: Mechanisms, Trade-offs, and Emerging Trends

Self-attention gives LLMs fine-grained, query-dependent access to context, but dense token interactions incur quadratic prefill cost and a key--value cache growing with context length. Research thus spans explicit-memory compression, sparse access, recurrent state construction, structured state dynamics, and heterogeneous mechanism composition. This survey analyzes these developments as model-internal contextual memory. We introduce a five-dimensional lens---Memory Representation, Memory Update, Access, Readout, and Integration---describing what is represented, how it changes, what is query-eligible, how it is read, and how readouts form outputs. This lens compares overlapping research lines without imposing one computational model. We reconstruct mechanism-level developments and architectural adoption using 59 release-level records from 14 major model lineages and 11 high-performing open-weight endpoints. First, explicit-memory and recurrent-state methods retain distinct interfaces but increasingly control overlapping memory functions. Second, heterogeneous architectures increasingly coordinate across network depth: layer-wise composition distributes complementary memory processing across representational stages, while cross-layer reuse carries selected memory and routing artifacts forward. Depth thus becomes a dimension along which contextual memory is constructed and managed. Third, these developments motivate a stateful multidimensional memory-routing hypothesis: persistent memory is organized across temporal scope, network depth, substrate type, and representation granularity, while coordinated Sparse Write and Sparse Read determine what is maintained and what contributes to each query. Overall, efficient sequence architecture design increasingly concerns the organization, lifecycle, and selective use of contextual memory rather than an isolated Attention operator.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 29 2

Compositional Caching for Training-free Open-vocabulary Attribute Detection

Attribute detection is crucial for many computer vision tasks, as it enables systems to describe properties such as color, texture, and material. Current approaches often rely on labor-intensive annotation processes which are inherently limited: objects can be described at an arbitrary level of detail (e.g., color vs. color shades), leading to ambiguities when the annotators are not instructed carefully. Furthermore, they operate within a predefined set of attributes, reducing scalability and adaptability to unforeseen downstream applications. We present Compositional Caching (ComCa), a training-free method for open-vocabulary attribute detection that overcomes these constraints. ComCa requires only the list of target attributes and objects as input, using them to populate an auxiliary cache of images by leveraging web-scale databases and Large Language Models to determine attribute-object compatibility. To account for the compositional nature of attributes, cache images receive soft attribute labels. Those are aggregated at inference time based on the similarity between the input and cache images, refining the predictions of underlying Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Importantly, our approach is model-agnostic, compatible with various VLMs. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that ComCa significantly outperforms zero-shot and cache-based baselines, competing with recent training-based methods, proving that a carefully designed training-free approach can successfully address open-vocabulary attribute detection.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 24, 2025

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

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

MeanCache: User-Centric Semantic Caching for LLM Web Services

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Llama have revolutionized natural language processing and search engine dynamics. However, these models incur exceptionally high computational costs. For instance, GPT-3 consists of 175 billion parameters, where inference demands billions of floating-point operations. Caching is a natural solution to reduce LLM inference costs on repeated queries, which constitute about 31% of the total queries. However, existing caching methods are incapable of finding semantic similarities among LLM queries nor do they operate on contextual queries, leading to unacceptable false hit-and-miss rates. This paper introduces MeanCache, a user-centric semantic cache for LLM-based services that identifies semantically similar queries to determine cache hit or miss. Using MeanCache, the response to a user's semantically similar query can be retrieved from a local cache rather than re-querying the LLM, thus reducing costs, service provider load, and environmental impact. MeanCache leverages Federated Learning (FL) to collaboratively train a query similarity model without violating user privacy. By placing a local cache in each user's device and using FL, MeanCache reduces the latency and costs and enhances model performance, resulting in lower false hit rates. MeanCache also encodes context chains for every cached query, offering a simple yet highly effective mechanism to discern contextual query responses from standalone. Our experiments benchmarked against the state-of-the-art caching method, reveal that MeanCache attains an approximately 17% higher F-score and a 20% increase in precision during semantic cache hit-and-miss decisions while performing even better on contextual queries. It also reduces the storage requirement by 83% and accelerates semantic cache hit-and-miss decisions by 11%.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 5, 2024

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

MAMBA: Multi-level Aggregation via Memory Bank for Video Object Detection

State-of-the-art video object detection methods maintain a memory structure, either a sliding window or a memory queue, to enhance the current frame using attention mechanisms. However, we argue that these memory structures are not efficient or sufficient because of two implied operations: (1) concatenating all features in memory for enhancement, leading to a heavy computational cost; (2) frame-wise memory updating, preventing the memory from capturing more temporal information. In this paper, we propose a multi-level aggregation architecture via memory bank called MAMBA. Specifically, our memory bank employs two novel operations to eliminate the disadvantages of existing methods: (1) light-weight key-set construction which can significantly reduce the computational cost; (2) fine-grained feature-wise updating strategy which enables our method to utilize knowledge from the whole video. To better enhance features from complementary levels, i.e., feature maps and proposals, we further propose a generalized enhancement operation (GEO) to aggregate multi-level features in a unified manner. We conduct extensive evaluations on the challenging ImageNetVID dataset. Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves superior performance in terms of both speed and accuracy. More remarkably, MAMBA achieves mAP of 83.7/84.6% at 12.6/9.1 FPS with ResNet-101. Code is available at https://github.com/guanxiongsun/video_feature_enhancement.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 18, 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

Optimizing Feature Set for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Click-through prediction (CTR) models transform features into latent vectors and enumerate possible feature interactions to improve performance based on the input feature set. Therefore, when selecting an optimal feature set, we should consider the influence of both feature and its interaction. However, most previous works focus on either feature field selection or only select feature interaction based on the fixed feature set to produce the feature set. The former restricts search space to the feature field, which is too coarse to determine subtle features. They also do not filter useless feature interactions, leading to higher computation costs and degraded model performance. The latter identifies useful feature interaction from all available features, resulting in many redundant features in the feature set. In this paper, we propose a novel method named OptFS to address these problems. To unify the selection of feature and its interaction, we decompose the selection of each feature interaction into the selection of two correlated features. Such a decomposition makes the model end-to-end trainable given various feature interaction operations. By adopting feature-level search space, we set a learnable gate to determine whether each feature should be within the feature set. Because of the large-scale search space, we develop a learning-by-continuation training scheme to learn such gates. Hence, OptFS generates the feature set only containing features which improve the final prediction results. Experimentally, we evaluate OptFS on three public datasets, demonstrating OptFS can optimize feature sets which enhance the model performance and further reduce both the storage and computational cost.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 25, 2023

CacheRepair: Learning to Repair Cross-Chunk Context in RAG for KV Cache Fusion

Multi-document retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) requires a language model to process multiple retrieved text chunks before answering a question. Precomputing each chunk's KV cache independently and concatenating the caches when the chunks are retrieved can accelerate this step. However, the assembled cache lacks cross-chunk attention information, reducing answer quality. Selective recomputation methods recover the missing cross-chunk context by rerunning the target LLM on selected tokens, incurring substantial online computation. We introduce CacheRepair, a lightweight network that learns the difference between independently computed KV caches and those produced by processing the chunks together. The network combines compressed KV features with token embeddings and uses attention that is bidirectional within each chunk and flows from earlier to later chunks. Each repair block receives the compressed cache features, and the predicted residual is added to every document token's cache. Each repair network is trained for a specific frozen target LLM on a generic retrieval corpus and reused across downstream datasets. Our analysis shows that repair reduces KV errors both near chunk boundaries and throughout chunk interiors. Evaluation across three target LLMs and four downstream datasets places CacheRepair on the measured answer-quality-latency Pareto frontier in eleven of twelve model-dataset combinations. Reported time to first token (TTFT) includes online cache transfer and repair. Across all twelve combinations, the largest repairers achieve 1.69-4.61times speedups in median TTFT over full prefill and improve mean F1 by 2.1-26.1 percentage points over direct cache reuse.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 27

A Survey on Large Language Model Acceleration based on KV Cache Management

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized a wide range of domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, and multi-modal tasks due to their ability to comprehend context and perform logical reasoning. However, the computational and memory demands of LLMs, particularly during inference, pose significant challenges when scaling them to real-world, long-context, and real-time applications. Key-Value (KV) cache management has emerged as a critical optimization technique for accelerating LLM inference by reducing redundant computations and improving memory utilization. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of KV cache management strategies for LLM acceleration, categorizing them into token-level, model-level, and system-level optimizations. Token-level strategies include KV cache selection, budget allocation, merging, quantization, and low-rank decomposition, while model-level optimizations focus on architectural innovations and attention mechanisms to enhance KV reuse. System-level approaches address memory management, scheduling, and hardware-aware designs to improve efficiency across diverse computing environments. Additionally, the survey provides an overview of both text and multimodal datasets and benchmarks used to evaluate these strategies. By presenting detailed taxonomies and comparative analyses, this work aims to offer useful insights for researchers and practitioners to support the development of efficient and scalable KV cache management techniques, contributing to the practical deployment of LLMs in real-world applications. The curated paper list for KV cache management is in: https://github.com/TreeAI-Lab/Awesome-KV-Cache-Management{https://github.com/TreeAI-Lab/Awesome-KV-Cache-Management}.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 26, 2024

What to Keep, What to Forget: A Rate--Distortion View of Memory Compaction in LLMs and Agents

Large language models, and the agents built on them, spend an ever-growing share of their compute and memory on remembering: caching attention keys and values, carrying long prompts, maintaining recurrent state, and storing what happened in previous turns and sessions. Because none of this memory is free, four largely separate research communities have each learned to compact it. They evict or quantize the KV cache, prune or distill prompts, bound architectural state, and consolidate agent memory. We argue that these are instances of one problem: a rate--distortion decision about what context-derived information to retain versus discard, at what fidelity, under a resource budget, so as to preserve downstream task utility. We make this lens precise with a single compaction objective and a layer-agnostic lower bound, use it to build a seven-axis taxonomy that classifies methods from across the stack uniformly, and use it to transfer mechanisms between layers that have never been connected, from serving-stack KV management to agent long-term memory. Two patterns hold across the survey. At every layer the signal that decides what to keep is attention magnitude or recency, and it fails in the same way everywhere, by discarding, before the query is known and with no way to undo it, information the query later needs. And while compression is measured carefully on single-turn long context, the repeated compaction that agents actually perform is almost never measured, and no benchmark holds one budget axis across all the layers at once. We turn both observations into a benchmark proposal, a small reference experiment, and a set of compaction-aware design principles, and we map the open problems.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 8

S^3-Attention:Attention-Aligned Endogenous Retrieval for Memory-Bounded Long-Context Inference

Large language models are increasingly applied to multi-document and long-form inputs, yet long-context inference remains memory- and noise-inefficient. Key-value (KV) caching scales linearly with context length, while external retrieval methods often return lexically similar but causally irrelevant passages. We present S3-Attention, a memory-first inference-time framework that treats long-context processing as attention-aligned endogenous retrieval. S3-Attention decodes transient key and query projections into top-k sparse feature identifiers using lightweight sparse autoencoders, and constructs a CPU-based inverted index mapping features to token positions or spans during a single streaming scan. This design allows the KV cache to be discarded entirely and bounds GPU memory usage by the scan chunk size. At generation time, feature co-activation is used to retrieve compact evidence spans, optionally fused with BM25 for exact lexical matching. Under a unified LongBench evaluation protocol with fixed prompting, decoding, and matched token budgets, S3-Hybrid closely matches full-context inference across multiple model families and improves robustness in several information-dense settings. We also report an engineering limitation of the current prototype, which incurs higher wall-clock latency than optimized full-KV baselines, motivating future kernel-level optimization.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 27