NanoKV: High-Ratio KV Cache Compression for Autoregressive Video Generation

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 $6.71\times$ KV cache compression with the best overall quality--efficiency tradeoff. Our code will be released on GitHub.

Autoregressive video diffusion models maintain a growing attention key-value (KV) cache, making memory a key bottleneck for long video generation. Recently, clustering-based quantization has emerged as an effective method to compress video KV caches by grouping similar key and value vectors then quantizing residual errors. However, when later frames attend to the compressed history, small reconstruction errors can compound as the video grows. Beyond the within-layer similarity exploited by clustering, we find strong dependencies across cache layers in video models. This motivates Coral-KV - Calibrated Offline, Residual-coded, and Adapted Locally - a KV-cache compression framework that uses cache states in each layer to predict keys and values in subsequent layers, then quantizes the remaining prediction residuals. We construct compact block-diagonal-plus-low-rank (block-DPLR) predictors: block-diagonal components model channel relationships within each attention head, while a global low-rank term models dependencies between heads. Coral-KV exposes a flexible fidelity-memory trade-off: it can reuse its predictors across videos or refit lightweight block-diagonal predictors to the current video for higher fidelity. Across extensive evaluations on both HY-WorldPlay and MAGI-1, our reusable configuration improves PSNR over QVG-4 by 0.32 dB and 4.95 dB, respectively, while using 48% and 37% less cache memory. Against QVG-Pro, our video-adapted configuration improves MAGI-1 PSNR by 3.77 dB while using 33.7% less cache memory. Coral-KV also maintains higher reconstruction fidelity over extended generation and reduces temporal discontinuities while retaining comparable generation latency.

Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models adopt a streaming generation framework, enabling long-horizon video generation with real-time responsiveness, as exemplified by the Self Forcing training paradigm. However, existing AR video diffusion models still suffer from significant attention complexity and severe memory overhead due to the redundant key-value (KV) caches across historical frames, which limits scalability. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by introducing KV cache compression into autoregressive video diffusion. We observe that attention heads in mainstream AR diffusion models exhibit markedly distinct attention patterns and functional roles that remain stable across samples and denoising steps. Building on our empirical study of head-wise functional specialization, we divide the attention heads into two categories: static heads, which focus on transitions across autoregressive chunks and intra-frame fidelity, and dynamic heads, which govern inter-frame motion and consistency. We then propose Forcing-KV, a hybrid KV cache compression strategy that performs structured static pruning for static heads and dynamic pruning based on segment-wise similarity for dynamic heads. While maintaining output quality, our method achieves a generation speed of over 29 frames per second on a single NVIDIA H200 GPU along with 30% cache memory reduction, delivering up to 1.35x and 1.50x speedups on LongLive and Self Forcing at 480P resolution, and further scaling to 2.82x speedup at 1080P resolution. Code and demo videos are provided at https://zju-jiyicheng.github.io/Forcing-KV-Page.