Token merging is an effective approach to reducing KV-cache memory consumption in autoregressive video generation by clustering temporally redundant tokens and retaining only a small set of representatives. Existing methods, however, typically apply a uniform merging ratio across all attention layers and heads. We observe that different layers and heads exhibit substantially different yet jointly correlated sensitivities to token merging, and that these sensitivity patterns remain consistent across prompts. Based on this observation, we introduce CALM, a Calibrated Allocation for Layer-Head Merging that uses offline calibration to improve online cache compression. Exhaustively evaluating all possible layer-head allocations is prohibitively expensive. To enable efficient calibration, we show that attention-output error strongly correlates with end-to-end video quality and can therefore serve as a lightweight proxy for allocation risk assessment. We evaluate different allocation strategies using this proxy and construct a fixed layer-head risk map offline. Given a cache budget at inference time, CALM uses dynamic programming to determine the best allocation of merging ratios. Experiments across three different autoregressive video models demonstrate that CALM consistently outperforms uniform token merging under the same memory budget, by reducing the LPIPS to original videos by around 21% with higher video-quality scores.
Autoregressive video generation paradigms offer theoretical promise for long video synthesis, yet their practical deployment is hindered by the computational burden of sequential iterative denoising. While cache reuse strategies can accelerate generation by skipping redundant denoising steps, existing methods rely on coarse-grained chunk-level skipping that fails to capture fine-grained pixel dynamics. This oversight is critical: pixels with high motion require more denoising steps to prevent error accumulation, while static pixels tolerate aggressive skipping. We formalize this insight theoretically by linking cache errors to residual instability, and propose MotionCache, a motion-aware cache framework that exploits inter-frame differences as a lightweight proxy for pixel-level motion characteristics. MotionCache employs a coarse-to-fine strategy: an initial warm-up phase establishes semantic coherence, followed by motion-weighted cache reuse that dynamically adjusts update frequencies per token. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models like SkyReels-V2 and MAGI-1 demonstrate that MotionCache achieves significant speedups of 6.28× and 1.64× respectively, while effectively preserving generation quality (VBench: 1%↓ and 0.01%↓ respectively). The code is available at https://github.com/ywlq/MotionCache.
Jing Xu, Yuexiao Ma, Xuzhe Zheng +7
1Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, 361005, P.R. China · 2ByteDance · 3Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, 4ELLIS Institute Tbingen, 5Tbingen AI Center
Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models enable streaming generation of long videos but suffer from significant memory overhead due to the rapidly growing KV cache. Existing KV cache quantization methods are primarily designed for LLMs and transfer poorly to video models, where activations exhibit different statistics and strong spatiotemporal redundancy. We observe that the video KV cache is largely predictable over time, with a clear asymmetry. Keys are highly predictable from their temporal history, while values depend primarily on the current key and need a short history of preceding values. Based on these observations, we propose \method, a training-free predictive KV cache quantization framework for AR video generation. \method predicts keys and values according to their distinct dependencies and stores only the residuals at low precision. Both predictors are lightweight, calibrated once offline by linear regression on a small set of BF16 samples, and remain fixed across prompts and generation runs. Experiments on Self-Forcing, Causal Forcing, and LongCat-Video-13B show that \method consistently achieves higher generation quality than existing KV cache quantization methods at comparable or higher compression ratios, reaching up to 6.71× KV cache compression with the best overall quality--efficiency tradeoff. Our code will be released on GitHub.
Jiahui Hu, Weile Mo, Peiliang Cai +5
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · South China University of Technology · Alibaba Group
In autoregressive video generation, retaining all historical key-value (KV) states increases memory usage and per-step attention costs as videos grow longer. A fixed cache budget bounds these costs but raises the challenge of preserving historical content that supports consistent, high-quality generation. Existing methods control cache size through history selection or consolidation, yet deciding what to retain and how to limit the loss of useful content remains a shared challenge. Our analysis shows that spatial queries depend on different historical content and that higher current attention coverage does not necessarily yield better long-video quality. We introduce FrameFold, a training-free KV cache consolidation method that compares the content retrieved by the same recent historical queries before and after merging to guide both representative construction and merge selection. Exploiting temporal redundancy between adjacent historical entries, FrameFold merges their KV states into shared representatives while retaining complete spatial grids. It fits value-merging coefficients in closed form by matching conditional attention responses, then selects the merge with the lowest remaining response distortion. Under matched KV cache budgets, experiments on Self Forcing and Causal Forcing at 30 and 60 seconds and on LongLive at 120 seconds demonstrate improved consistency and visual quality. Continuous eight-minute Self Forcing rollouts further show less quality degradation than the baselines.
Muyu Liu, Mingming Liu, Hong Gu +2
ShanghaiTech University · vivo BlueImage Lab, vivo Mobile Communication Co., Ltd., China