MMInference: Accelerating Pre-filling for Long-Context VLMs via
  Modality-Aware Permutation Sparse Attention
Authors: name: Yucheng Li; name: Huiqiang Jiang; name: Chengruidong Zhang; name: Qianhui Wu; name: Xufang Luo; name: Surin Ahn; name: Amir H. Abdi; name: Dongsheng Li; name: Jianfeng Gao; name: Yuqing Yang; name: Lili Qiu
Published: 2025-04-22 17:59:51

Abstract: The integration of long-context capabilities with visual understanding
unlocks unprecedented potential for Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, the
quadratic attention complexity during the pre-filling phase remains a
significant obstacle to real-world deployment. To overcome this limitation, we
introduce MMInference (Multimodality Million tokens Inference), a dynamic
sparse attention method that accelerates the prefilling stage for long-context
multi-modal inputs. First, our analysis reveals that the temporal and spatial
locality of video input leads to a unique sparse pattern, the Grid pattern.
Simultaneously, VLMs exhibit markedly different sparse distributions across
different modalities. We introduce a permutation-based method to leverage the
unique Grid pattern and handle modality boundary issues. By offline search the
optimal sparse patterns for each head, MMInference constructs the sparse
distribution dynamically based on the input. We also provide optimized GPU
kernels for efficient sparse computations. Notably, MMInference integrates
seamlessly into existing VLM pipelines without any model modifications or
fine-tuning. Experiments on multi-modal benchmarks-including Video QA,
Captioning, VisionNIAH, and Mixed-Modality NIAH-with state-of-the-art
long-context VLMs (LongVila, LlavaVideo, VideoChat-Flash, Qwen2.5-VL) show that
MMInference accelerates the pre-filling stage by up to 8.3x at 1M tokens while
maintaining accuracy. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/MMInference.