Plug-and-Play 1.x-Bit KV Cache Quantization for Video Large Language
  Models
Authors: name: Keda Tao; name: Haoxuan You; name: Yang Sui; name: Can Qin; name: Huan Wang
Published: 2025-03-20 15:52:43

Abstract: Video large language models (VideoLLMs) have demonstrated the capability to
process longer video inputs and enable complex reasoning and analysis. However,
due to the thousands of visual tokens from the video frames, key-value (KV)
cache can significantly increase memory requirements, becoming a bottleneck for
inference speed and memory usage. KV cache quantization is a widely used
approach to address this problem. In this paper, we find that 2-bit KV
quantization of VideoLLMs can hardly hurt the model performance, while the
limit of KV cache quantization in even lower bits has not been investigated. To
bridge this gap, we introduce VidKV, a plug-and-play KV cache quantization
method to compress the KV cache to lower than 2 bits. Specifically, (1) for
key, we propose a mixed-precision quantization strategy in the channel
dimension, where we perform 2-bit quantization for anomalous channels and 1-bit
quantization combined with FFT for normal channels; (2) for value, we implement
1.58-bit quantization while selectively filtering semantically salient visual
tokens for targeted preservation, for a better trade-off between precision and
model performance. Importantly, our findings suggest that the value cache of
VideoLLMs should be quantized in a per-channel fashion instead of the per-token
fashion proposed by prior KV cache quantization works for LLMs. Empirically,
extensive results with LLaVA-OV-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B on six benchmarks show
that VidKV effectively compresses the KV cache to 1.5-bit and 1.58-bit
precision with almost no performance drop compared to the FP16 counterparts.