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Dec 12

Unified Multivariate Gaussian Mixture for Efficient Neural Image Compression

Modeling latent variables with priors and hyperpriors is an essential problem in variational image compression. Formally, trade-off between rate and distortion is handled well if priors and hyperpriors precisely describe latent variables. Current practices only adopt univariate priors and process each variable individually. However, we find inter-correlations and intra-correlations exist when observing latent variables in a vectorized perspective. These findings reveal visual redundancies to improve rate-distortion performance and parallel processing ability to speed up compression. This encourages us to propose a novel vectorized prior. Specifically, a multivariate Gaussian mixture is proposed with means and covariances to be estimated. Then, a novel probabilistic vector quantization is utilized to effectively approximate means, and remaining covariances are further induced to a unified mixture and solved by cascaded estimation without context models involved. Furthermore, codebooks involved in quantization are extended to multi-codebooks for complexity reduction, which formulates an efficient compression procedure. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets against state-of-the-art indicate our model has better rate-distortion performance and an impressive 3.18times compression speed up, giving us the ability to perform real-time, high-quality variational image compression in practice. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/xiaosu-zhu/McQuic.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 21, 2022

CSKV: Training-Efficient Channel Shrinking for KV Cache in Long-Context Scenarios

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted to process long-context tasks. However, the large memory overhead of the key-value (KV) cache poses significant challenges in long-context scenarios. Existing training-free KV cache compression methods typically focus on quantization and token pruning, which have compression limits, and excessive sparsity can lead to severe performance degradation. Other methods design new architectures with less KV overhead but require significant training overhead. To address the above two drawbacks, we further explore the redundancy in the channel dimension and apply an architecture-level design with minor training costs. Therefore, we introduce CSKV, a training-efficient Channel Shrinking technique for KV cache compression: (1) We first analyze the singular value distribution of the KV cache, revealing significant redundancy and compression potential along the channel dimension. Based on this observation, we propose using low-rank decomposition for key and value layers and storing the low-dimension features. (2) To preserve model performance, we introduce a bi-branch KV cache, including a window-based full-precision KV cache and a low-precision compressed KV cache. (3) To reduce the training costs, we minimize the layer-wise reconstruction loss for the compressed KV cache instead of retraining the entire LLMs. Extensive experiments show that CSKV can reduce the memory overhead of the KV cache by 80% while maintaining the model's long-context capability. Moreover, we show that our method can be seamlessly combined with quantization to further reduce the memory overhead, achieving a compression ratio of up to 95%.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 16, 2024

Plug-and-Play 1.x-Bit KV Cache Quantization for Video Large Language Models

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 20 3

xKV: Cross-Layer SVD for KV-Cache Compression

Large Language Models (LLMs) with long context windows enable powerful applications but come at the cost of high memory consumption to store the Key and Value states (KV-Cache). Recent studies attempted to merge KV-cache from multiple layers into shared representations, yet these approaches either require expensive pretraining or rely on assumptions of high per-token cosine similarity across layers which generally does not hold in practice. We find that the dominant singular vectors are remarkably well-aligned across multiple layers of the KV-Cache. Exploiting this insight, we propose xKV, a simple post-training method that applies Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on the KV-Cache of grouped layers. xKV consolidates the KV-Cache of multiple layers into a shared low-rank subspace, significantly reducing KV-Cache sizes. Through extensive evaluations on the RULER long-context benchmark with widely-used LLMs (e.g., Llama-3.1 and Qwen2.5), xKV achieves up to 6.8x higher compression rates than state-of-the-art inter-layer technique while improving accuracy by 2.7%. Moreover, xKV is compatible with the emerging Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) (e.g., DeepSeek-Coder-V2), yielding a notable 3x compression rates on coding tasks without performance degradation. These results highlight xKV's strong capability and versatility in addressing memory bottlenecks for long-context LLM inference. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/abdelfattah-lab/xKV.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 24 1

D^2iT: Dynamic Diffusion Transformer for Accurate Image Generation

Diffusion models are widely recognized for their ability to generate high-fidelity images. Despite the excellent performance and scalability of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, it applies fixed compression across different image regions during the diffusion process, disregarding the naturally varying information densities present in these regions. However, large compression leads to limited local realism, while small compression increases computational complexity and compromises global consistency, ultimately impacting the quality of generated images. To address these limitations, we propose dynamically compressing different image regions by recognizing the importance of different regions, and introduce a novel two-stage framework designed to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of image generation: (1) Dynamic VAE (DVAE) at first stage employs a hierarchical encoder to encode different image regions at different downsampling rates, tailored to their specific information densities, thereby providing more accurate and natural latent codes for the diffusion process. (2) Dynamic Diffusion Transformer (D^2iT) at second stage generates images by predicting multi-grained noise, consisting of coarse-grained (less latent code in smooth regions) and fine-grained (more latent codes in detailed regions), through an novel combination of the Dynamic Grain Transformer and the Dynamic Content Transformer. The strategy of combining rough prediction of noise with detailed regions correction achieves a unification of global consistency and local realism. Comprehensive experiments on various generation tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/jiawn-creator/Dynamic-DiT.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 13 2

Extreme Image Compression using Fine-tuned VQGANs

Recent advances in generative compression methods have demonstrated remarkable progress in enhancing the perceptual quality of compressed data, especially in scenarios with low bitrates. However, their efficacy and applicability to achieve extreme compression ratios (<0.05 bpp) remain constrained. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective coding framework by introducing vector quantization (VQ)--based generative models into the image compression domain. The main insight is that the codebook learned by the VQGAN model yields a strong expressive capacity, facilitating efficient compression of continuous information in the latent space while maintaining reconstruction quality. Specifically, an image can be represented as VQ-indices by finding the nearest codeword, which can be encoded using lossless compression methods into bitstreams. We propose clustering a pre-trained large-scale codebook into smaller codebooks through the K-means algorithm, yielding variable bitrates and different levels of reconstruction quality within the coding framework. Furthermore, we introduce a transformer to predict lost indices and restore images in unstable environments. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art codecs in terms of perceptual quality-oriented metrics and human perception at extremely low bitrates (le 0.04 bpp). Remarkably, even with the loss of up to 20% of indices, the images can be effectively restored with minimal perceptual loss.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 17, 2023

ZipCache: Accurate and Efficient KV Cache Quantization with Salient Token Identification

KV cache stores key and value states from previous tokens to avoid re-computation, yet it demands substantial storage space, especially for long sequences. Adaptive KV cache compression seeks to discern the saliency of tokens, preserving vital information while aggressively compressing those of less importance. However, previous methods of this approach exhibit significant performance degradation at high compression ratios due to inaccuracies in identifying salient tokens. In this paper, we present ZipCache, an accurate and efficient KV cache quantization method for LLMs. First, we construct a strong baseline for quantizing KV cache. Through the proposed channel-separable tokenwise quantization scheme, the memory overhead of quantization parameters are substantially reduced compared to fine-grained groupwise quantization. To enhance the compression ratio, we propose normalized attention score as an effective metric for identifying salient tokens by considering the lower triangle characteristics of the attention matrix. Moreover, we develop an efficient approximation method that decouples the saliency metric from full attention scores, enabling compatibility with fast attention implementations like FlashAttention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ZipCache achieves superior compression ratios, fast generation speed and minimal performance losses compared with previous KV cache compression methods. For instance, when evaluating Mistral-7B model on GSM8k dataset, ZipCache is capable of compressing the KV cache by 4.98times, with only a 0.38% drop in accuracy. In terms of efficiency, ZipCache also showcases a 37.3% reduction in prefill-phase latency, a 56.9% reduction in decoding-phase latency, and a 19.8% reduction in GPU memory usage when evaluating LLaMA3-8B model with a input length of 4096.

  • 6 authors
·
May 23, 2024

ShadowKV: KV Cache in Shadows for High-Throughput Long-Context LLM Inference

With the widespread deployment of long-context large language models (LLMs), there has been a growing demand for efficient support of high-throughput inference. However, as the key-value (KV) cache expands with the sequence length, the increasing memory footprint and the need to access it for each token generation both result in low throughput when serving long-context LLMs. While various dynamic sparse attention methods have been proposed to speed up inference while maintaining generation quality, they either fail to sufficiently reduce GPU memory consumption or introduce significant decoding latency by offloading the KV cache to the CPU. We present ShadowKV, a high-throughput long-context LLM inference system that stores the low-rank key cache and offloads the value cache to reduce the memory footprint for larger batch sizes and longer sequences. To minimize decoding latency, ShadowKV employs an accurate KV selection strategy that reconstructs minimal sparse KV pairs on-the-fly. By evaluating ShadowKV on a broad range of benchmarks, including RULER, LongBench, and Needle In A Haystack, and models like Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3-8B-1M, GLM-4-9B-1M, Yi-9B-200K, Phi-3-Mini-128K, and Qwen2-7B-128K, we demonstrate that it can support up to 6times larger batch sizes and boost throughput by up to 3.04times on an A100 GPU without sacrificing accuracy, even surpassing the performance achievable with infinite batch size under the assumption of infinite GPU memory. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/ShadowKV.

ByteDance-Seed ByteDance Seed
·
Oct 28, 2024 2

Memory-Efficient Visual Autoregressive Modeling with Scale-Aware KV Cache Compression

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling has garnered significant attention for its innovative next-scale prediction approach, which yields substantial improvements in efficiency, scalability, and zero-shot generalization. Nevertheless, the coarse-to-fine methodology inherent in VAR results in exponential growth of the KV cache during inference, causing considerable memory consumption and computational redundancy. To address these bottlenecks, we introduce ScaleKV, a novel KV cache compression framework tailored for VAR architectures. ScaleKV leverages two critical observations: varying cache demands across transformer layers and distinct attention patterns at different scales. Based on these insights, ScaleKV categorizes transformer layers into two functional groups: drafters and refiners. Drafters exhibit dispersed attention across multiple scales, thereby requiring greater cache capacity. Conversely, refiners focus attention on the current token map to process local details, consequently necessitating substantially reduced cache capacity. ScaleKV optimizes the multi-scale inference pipeline by identifying scale-specific drafters and refiners, facilitating differentiated cache management tailored to each scale. Evaluation on the state-of-the-art text-to-image VAR model family, Infinity, demonstrates that our approach effectively reduces the required KV cache memory to 10% while preserving pixel-level fidelity.

  • 4 authors
·
May 26 2

UNComp: Can Matrix Entropy Uncover Sparsity? -- A Compressor Design from an Uncertainty-Aware Perspective

Deploying large language models (LLMs) for long-context inference remains challenging due to their substantial memory and computational demands. While techniques such as Key-Value (KV) cache compression are designed to reduce memory usage, they often neglect the structured sparsity inherent in the relationship between hidden states and their corresponding KV cache. In this work, we explore the role of uncertainty as a potential indicator of sparsity within LLMs. We propose UNComp, an uncertainty-aware framework that leverages truncated matrix entropy to identify areas of low information content, thereby revealing sparsity patterns that can be used for adaptive compression. Unlike traditional methods that apply uniform compression, UNComp dynamically adjusts its approach to compression, guided by uncertainty measures that reflect the importance of various model components. Our analysis shows that sparsity patterns, when derived from uncertainty estimates, can be exploited to reveal special long-range dependencies, such as retrieval heads and retrieval layers. This perspective not only enhances our understanding of how compression can be optimized but also provides new insights into the inherent sparsity of LLMs during long-context inference. By focusing on uncertainty to analyze the sparsity pattern in detail, UNComp reduces the KV cache size to 4.74% of the original, achieves a 6% prefill speedup, and improves throughput by 6.4x - not only delivering strong lossless compression performance, but also validating the effectiveness of the underlying theoretical tool. We release the code at https://github.com/menik1126/UNComp.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

PrefixKV: Adaptive Prefix KV Cache is What Vision Instruction-Following Models Need for Efficient Generation

Recently, large vision-language models (LVLMs) have rapidly gained popularity for their strong generation and reasoning capabilities given diverse multimodal inputs. However, these models incur significant computational and memory overhead during inference, which greatly hinders the efficient deployment in practical scenarios. The extensive key-value (KV) cache, necessitated by the lengthy input and output sequences, notably contributes to the high inference cost. Based on this, recent works have investigated ways to reduce the KV cache size for higher efficiency. Although effective, they generally overlook the distinct importance distributions of KV vectors across layers and maintain the same cache size for each layer during the next token prediction. This results in the significant contextual information loss for certain layers, leading to notable performance decline. To address this, we present PrefixKV. It reframes the challenge of determining KV cache sizes for all layers into the task of searching for the optimal global prefix configuration. With an adaptive layer-wise KV retention recipe based on binary search, the maximum contextual information can thus be preserved in each layer, facilitating the generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with others. It exhibits superior inference efficiency and generation quality trade-offs, showing promising potential for practical applications. Code is available at https://github.com/THU-MIG/PrefixKV.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 4, 2024

GEAR: An Efficient KV Cache Compression Recipefor Near-Lossless Generative Inference of LLM

Key-value (KV) caching has become the de-facto to accelerate generation speed for large language models (LLMs) inference. However, the growing cache demand with increasing sequence length has transformed LLM inference to be a memory bound problem, significantly constraining the system throughput. Existing methods rely on dropping unimportant tokens or quantizing all entries uniformly. Such methods, however, often incur high approximation errors to represent the compressed matrices. The autoregressive decoding process further compounds the error of each step, resulting in critical deviation in model generation and deterioration of performance. To tackle this challenge, we propose GEAR, an efficient KV cache compression framework that achieves near-lossless high-ratio compression. GEAR first applies quantization to majority of entries of similar magnitudes to ultra-low precision. It then employs a low rank matrix to approximate the quantization error, and a sparse matrix to remedy individual errors from outlier entries. By adeptly integrating three techniques, GEAR is able to fully exploit their synergistic potentials. Our experiments demonstrate that compared to alternatives, GEAR achieves near-lossless 4-bit KV cache compression with up to 2.38x throughput improvement, while reducing peak-memory size up to 2.29x. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/HaoKang-Timmy/GEAR.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 8, 2024 2

Distributed Methods with Compressed Communication for Solving Variational Inequalities, with Theoretical Guarantees

Variational inequalities in general and saddle point problems in particular are increasingly relevant in machine learning applications, including adversarial learning, GANs, transport and robust optimization. With increasing data and problem sizes necessary to train high performing models across various applications, we need to rely on parallel and distributed computing. However, in distributed training, communication among the compute nodes is a key bottleneck during training, and this problem is exacerbated for high dimensional and over-parameterized models. Due to these considerations, it is important to equip existing methods with strategies that would allow to reduce the volume of transmitted information during training while obtaining a model of comparable quality. In this paper, we present the first theoretically grounded distributed methods for solving variational inequalities and saddle point problems using compressed communication: MASHA1 and MASHA2. Our theory and methods allow for the use of both unbiased (such as Randk; MASHA1) and contractive (such as Topk; MASHA2) compressors. New algorithms support bidirectional compressions, and also can be modified for stochastic setting with batches and for federated learning with partial participation of clients. We empirically validated our conclusions using two experimental setups: a standard bilinear min-max problem, and large-scale distributed adversarial training of transformers.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 7, 2021

Efficient Semantic Segmentation by Altering Resolutions for Compressed Videos

Video semantic segmentation (VSS) is a computationally expensive task due to the per-frame prediction for videos of high frame rates. In recent work, compact models or adaptive network strategies have been proposed for efficient VSS. However, they did not consider a crucial factor that affects the computational cost from the input side: the input resolution. In this paper, we propose an altering resolution framework called AR-Seg for compressed videos to achieve efficient VSS. AR-Seg aims to reduce the computational cost by using low resolution for non-keyframes. To prevent the performance degradation caused by downsampling, we design a Cross Resolution Feature Fusion (CReFF) module, and supervise it with a novel Feature Similarity Training (FST) strategy. Specifically, CReFF first makes use of motion vectors stored in a compressed video to warp features from high-resolution keyframes to low-resolution non-keyframes for better spatial alignment, and then selectively aggregates the warped features with local attention mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed FST supervises the aggregated features with high-resolution features through an explicit similarity loss and an implicit constraint from the shared decoding layer. Extensive experiments on CamVid and Cityscapes show that AR-Seg achieves state-of-the-art performance and is compatible with different segmentation backbones. On CamVid, AR-Seg saves 67% computational cost (measured in GFLOPs) with the PSPNet18 backbone while maintaining high segmentation accuracy. Code: https://github.com/THU-LYJ-Lab/AR-Seg.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 13, 2023

Region-Adaptive Transform with Segmentation Prior for Image Compression

Learned Image Compression (LIC) has shown remarkable progress in recent years. Existing works commonly employ CNN-based or self-attention-based modules as transform methods for compression. However, there is no prior research on neural transform that focuses on specific regions. In response, we introduce the class-agnostic segmentation masks (i.e. semantic masks without category labels) for extracting region-adaptive contextual information. Our proposed module, Region-Adaptive Transform, applies adaptive convolutions on different regions guided by the masks. Additionally, we introduce a plug-and-play module named Scale Affine Layer to incorporate rich contexts from various regions. While there have been prior image compression efforts that involve segmentation masks as additional intermediate inputs, our approach differs significantly from them. Our advantages lie in that, to avoid extra bitrate overhead, we treat these masks as privilege information, which is accessible during the model training stage but not required during the inference phase. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ class-agnostic masks as privilege information and achieve superior performance in pixel-fidelity metrics, such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). The experimental results demonstrate our improvement compared to previously well-performing methods, with about 8.2% bitrate saving compared to VTM-17.0. The source code is available at https://github.com/GityuxiLiu/SegPIC-for-Image-Compression.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 1, 2024

OD-VAE: An Omni-dimensional Video Compressor for Improving Latent Video Diffusion Model

Variational Autoencoder (VAE), compressing videos into latent representations, is a crucial preceding component of Latent Video Diffusion Models (LVDMs). With the same reconstruction quality, the more sufficient the VAE's compression for videos is, the more efficient the LVDMs are. However, most LVDMs utilize 2D image VAE, whose compression for videos is only in the spatial dimension and often ignored in the temporal dimension. How to conduct temporal compression for videos in a VAE to obtain more concise latent representations while promising accurate reconstruction is seldom explored. To fill this gap, we propose an omni-dimension compression VAE, named OD-VAE, which can temporally and spatially compress videos. Although OD-VAE's more sufficient compression brings a great challenge to video reconstruction, it can still achieve high reconstructed accuracy by our fine design. To obtain a better trade-off between video reconstruction quality and compression speed, four variants of OD-VAE are introduced and analyzed. In addition, a novel tail initialization is designed to train OD-VAE more efficiently, and a novel inference strategy is proposed to enable OD-VAE to handle videos of arbitrary length with limited GPU memory. Comprehensive experiments on video reconstruction and LVDM-based video generation demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 2, 2024 2

Mustafar: Promoting Unstructured Sparsity for KV Cache Pruning in LLM Inference

We demonstrate that unstructured sparsity significantly improves KV cache compression for LLMs, enabling sparsity levels up to 70% without compromising accuracy or requiring fine-tuning. We conduct a systematic exploration of pruning strategies and find per-token magnitude-based pruning as highly effective for both Key and Value caches under unstructured sparsity, surpassing prior structured pruning schemes. The Key cache benefits from prominent outlier elements, while the Value cache surprisingly benefits from a simple magnitude-based pruning despite its uniform distribution. KV cache size is the major bottleneck in decode performance due to high memory overhead for large context lengths. To address this, we use a bitmap-based sparse format and a custom attention kernel capable of compressing and directly computing over compressed caches pruned to arbitrary sparsity patterns, significantly accelerating memory-bound operations in decode computations and thereby compensating for the overhead of runtime pruning and compression. Our custom attention kernel coupled with the bitmap-based format delivers substantial compression of KV cache upto 45% of dense inference and thereby enables longer context length and increased tokens/sec throughput of upto 2.23x compared to dense inference. Our pruning mechanism and sparse attention kernel is available at https://github.com/dhjoo98/mustafar.

  • 4 authors
·
May 28

OSCAR: One-Step Diffusion Codec Across Multiple Bit-rates

Pretrained latent diffusion models have shown strong potential for lossy image compression, owing to their powerful generative priors. Most existing diffusion-based methods reconstruct images by iteratively denoising from random noise, guided by compressed latent representations. While these approaches have achieved high reconstruction quality, their multi-step sampling process incurs substantial computational overhead. Moreover, they typically require training separate models for different compression bit-rates, leading to significant training and storage costs. To address these challenges, we propose a one-step diffusion codec across multiple bit-rates. termed OSCAR. Specifically, our method views compressed latents as noisy variants of the original latents, where the level of distortion depends on the bit-rate. This perspective allows them to be modeled as intermediate states along a diffusion trajectory. By establishing a mapping from the compression bit-rate to a pseudo diffusion timestep, we condition a single generative model to support reconstructions at multiple bit-rates. Meanwhile, we argue that the compressed latents retain rich structural information, thereby making one-step denoising feasible. Thus, OSCAR replaces iterative sampling with a single denoising pass, significantly improving inference efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OSCAR achieves superior performance in both quantitative and visual quality metrics. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/jp-guo/OSCAR.

  • 9 authors
·
May 21

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

S2LIC: Learned Image Compression with the SwinV2 Block, Adaptive Channel-wise and Global-inter Attention Context

Recently, deep learning technology has been successfully applied in the field of image compression, leading to superior rate-distortion performance. It is crucial to design an effective and efficient entropy model to estimate the probability distribution of the latent representation. However, the majority of entropy models primarily focus on one-dimensional correlation processing between channel and spatial information. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Channel-wise and Global-inter attention Context (ACGC) entropy model, which can efficiently achieve dual feature aggregation in both inter-slice and intraslice contexts. Specifically, we divide the latent representation into different slices and then apply the ACGC model in a parallel checkerboard context to achieve faster decoding speed and higher rate-distortion performance. In order to capture redundant global features across different slices, we utilize deformable attention in adaptive global-inter attention to dynamically refine the attention weights based on the actual spatial relationships and context. Furthermore, in the main transformation structure, we propose a high-performance S2LIC model. We introduce the residual SwinV2 Transformer model to capture global feature information and utilize a dense block network as the feature enhancement module to improve the nonlinear representation of the image within the transformation structure. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves faster encoding and decoding speeds and outperforms VTM-17.1 and some recent learned image compression methods in both PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024

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

TED-4DGS: Temporally Activated and Embedding-based Deformation for 4DGS Compression

Building on the success of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) in static 3D scene representation, its extension to dynamic scenes, commonly referred to as 4DGS or dynamic 3DGS, has attracted increasing attention. However, designing more compact and efficient deformation schemes together with rate-distortion-optimized compression strategies for dynamic 3DGS representations remains an underexplored area. Prior methods either rely on space-time 4DGS with overspecified, short-lived Gaussian primitives or on canonical 3DGS with deformation that lacks explicit temporal control. To address this, we present TED-4DGS, a temporally activated and embedding-based deformation scheme for rate-distortion-optimized 4DGS compression that unifies the strengths of both families. TED-4DGS is built on a sparse anchor-based 3DGS representation. Each canonical anchor is assigned learnable temporal-activation parameters to specify its appearance and disappearance transitions over time, while a lightweight per-anchor temporal embedding queries a shared deformation bank to produce anchor-specific deformation. For rate-distortion compression, we incorporate an implicit neural representation (INR)-based hyperprior to model anchor attribute distributions, along with a channel-wise autoregressive model to capture intra-anchor correlations. With these novel elements, our scheme achieves state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance on several real-world datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents one of the first attempts to pursue a rate-distortion-optimized compression framework for dynamic 3DGS representations.

ISCS: Parameter-Guided Channel Ordering and Grouping for Learned Image Compression

Prior studies in learned image compression (LIC) consistently show that only a small subset of latent channels is critical for reconstruction, while many others carry limited information. Exploiting this imbalance could improve both coding and computational efficiency, yet existing approaches often rely on costly, dataset-specific ablation tests and typically analyze channels in isolation, ignoring their interdependencies. We propose a generalizable, dataset-agnostic method to identify and organize important channels in pretrained VAE-based LIC models. Instead of brute-force empirical evaluations, our approach leverages intrinsic parameter statistics-weight variances, bias magnitudes, and pairwise correlations-to estimate channel importance. This analysis reveals a consistent organizational structure, termed the Invariant Salient Channel Space (ISCS), where Salient-Core channels capture dominant structures and Salient-Auxiliary channels provide complementary details. Building on ISCS, we introduce a deterministic channel ordering and grouping strategy that enables slice-parallel decoding, reduces redundancy, and improves bitrate efficiency. Experiments across multiple LIC architectures demonstrate that our method effectively reduces bitrate and computation while maintaining reconstruction quality, providing a practical and modular enhancement to existing learned compression frameworks.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 20

Spatiotemporal Entropy Model is All You Need for Learned Video Compression

The framework of dominant learned video compression methods is usually composed of motion prediction modules as well as motion vector and residual image compression modules, suffering from its complex structure and error propagation problem. Approaches have been proposed to reduce the complexity by replacing motion prediction modules with implicit flow networks. Error propagation aware training strategy is also proposed to alleviate incremental reconstruction errors from previously decoded frames. Although these methods have brought some improvement, little attention has been paid to the framework itself. Inspired by the success of learned image compression through simplifying the framework with a single deep neural network, it is natural to expect a better performance in video compression via a simple yet appropriate framework. Therefore, we propose a framework to directly compress raw-pixel frames (rather than residual images), where no extra motion prediction module is required. Instead, an entropy model is used to estimate the spatiotemporal redundancy in a latent space rather than pixel level, which significantly reduces the complexity of the framework. Specifically, the whole framework is a compression module, consisting of a unified auto-encoder which produces identically distributed latents for all frames, and a spatiotemporal entropy estimation model to minimize the entropy of these latents. Experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under the metric of multiscale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) and achieves competitive results under the metric of PSNR.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 13, 2021

Addressing Representation Collapse in Vector Quantized Models with One Linear Layer

Vector Quantization (VQ) is a widely used method for converting continuous representations into discrete codes, which has become fundamental in unsupervised representation learning and latent generative models. However, VQ models are often hindered by the problem of representation collapse in the latent space, which leads to low codebook utilization and limits the scalability of the codebook for large-scale training. Existing methods designed to mitigate representation collapse typically reduce the dimensionality of latent space at the expense of model capacity, which do not fully resolve the core issue. In this study, we conduct a theoretical analysis of representation collapse in VQ models and identify its primary cause as the disjoint optimization of the codebook, where only a small subset of code vectors are updated through gradient descent. To address this issue, we propose SimVQ, a novel method which reparameterizes the code vectors through a linear transformation layer based on a learnable latent basis. This transformation optimizes the entire linear space spanned by the codebook, rather than merely updating the code vector selected by the nearest-neighbor search in vanilla VQ models. Although it is commonly understood that the multiplication of two linear matrices is equivalent to applying a single linear layer, our approach works surprisingly well in resolving the collapse issue in VQ models with just one linear layer. We validate the efficacy of SimVQ through extensive experiments across various modalities, including image and audio data with different model architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/youngsheen/SimVQ.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 4, 2024

Learning Low-Rank Representations for Model Compression

Vector Quantization (VQ) is an appealing model compression method to obtain a tiny model with less accuracy loss. While methods to obtain better codebooks and codes under fixed clustering dimensionality have been extensively studied, optimizations of the vectors in favour of clustering performance are not carefully considered, especially via the reduction of vector dimensionality. This paper reports our recent progress on the combination of dimensionality compression and vector quantization, proposing a Low-Rank Representation Vector Quantization (LR^2VQ) method that outperforms previous VQ algorithms in various tasks and architectures. LR^2VQ joins low-rank representation with subvector clustering to construct a new kind of building block that is directly optimized through end-to-end training over the task loss. Our proposed design pattern introduces three hyper-parameters, the number of clusters k, the size of subvectors m and the clustering dimensionality d. In our method, the compression ratio could be directly controlled by m, and the final accuracy is solely determined by d. We recognize d as a trade-off between low-rank approximation error and clustering error and carry out both theoretical analysis and experimental observations that empower the estimation of the proper d before fine-tunning. With a proper d, we evaluate LR^2VQ with ResNet-18/ResNet-50 on ImageNet classification datasets, achieving 2.8\%/1.0\% top-1 accuracy improvements over the current state-of-the-art VQ-based compression algorithms with 43times/31times compression factor.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 21, 2022

WindowKV: Task-Adaptive Group-Wise KV Cache Window Selection for Efficient LLM Inference

With the advancements in long-context inference capabilities of large language models (LLMs), the KV cache has become one of the foundational components. However, its substantial GPU memory consumption makes KV cache compression a key technique for enabling efficient LLM inference in industrial scenarios. While recent studies have focused on optimizing the memory occupied by the KV cache, they overlook two critical factors: preserving semantic coherence and considering task-specific characteristic during compression. To address these limitations, we propose a novel task-adaptive KV cache window selection method, WindowKV. WindowKV dynamically selects local semantic windows consisting of consecutive tokens, according to task-specific characteristics, ensuring the retained KV cache captures continuous, essential context. Additionally, we introduce an intra-group layer KV cache indices sharing strategy to reduce computational overhead, achieving a balance between performance and efficiency. We rigorously evaluate WindowKV on the LongBench benchmark, and the results demonstrate that it maintains a performance comparable to full KV cache retention while using only 12% of the original KV cache, significantly reducing memory requirements. Furthermore, our method also achieves state-of-the-art results in the Needle-in-a-Haystack evaluation, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 22

GQSA: Group Quantization and Sparsity for Accelerating Large Language Model Inference

Model compression has emerged as a mainstream solution to reduce memory usage and computational overhead. This paper presents Group Quantization and Sparse Acceleration (GQSA), a novel compression technique tailored for LLMs. Traditional methods typically focus exclusively on either quantization or sparsification, but relying on a single strategy often results in significant performance loss at high compression rates. In contrast, GQSA integrates quantization and sparsification in a tightly coupled manner, leveraging GPU-friendly structured group sparsity and quantization for efficient acceleration. Building upon system-algorithm co-design principles, we propose a two-stage sparse optimization strategy that ensures the performance superiority of the compressed model. On the engine side, we introduce a "task-centric" parallel strategy, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first application in the domain of sparse computing. Compared to the traditional 2:4 sparse method, the GQSA offers a more flexible and adjustable sparsity rate, as well as a higher weight compression rate, and is efficiently compatible with weight-only quantization methods. Experimental results demonstrate that, under the GQSA W4S50% compression setting, the model's accuracy surpasses that of both 2:4 pruning and W2 quantization. Furthermore, at the inference level, GQSA outperforms W2 by 1.26times and 2:4 pruning by 2.35times in terms of speed.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 23, 2024

GUI-KV: Efficient GUI Agents via KV Cache with Spatio-Temporal Awareness

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents built on vision-language models have emerged as a promising approach to automate human-computer workflows. However, they also face the inefficiency challenge as they process long sequences of high-resolution screenshots and solving long-horizon tasks, making inference slow, costly and memory-bound. While key-value (KV) caching can mitigate this, storing the full cache is prohibitive for image-heavy contexts. Existing cache-compression methods are sub-optimal as they do not account for the spatial and temporal redundancy of GUIs. In this work, we first analyze attention patterns in GUI agent workloads and find that, unlike in natural images, attention sparsity is uniformly high across all transformer layers. This insight motivates a simple uniform budget allocation strategy, which we show empirically outperforms more complex layer-varying schemes. Building on this, we introduce GUI-KV, a plug-and-play KV cache compression method for GUI agents that requires no retraining. GUI-KV combines two novel techniques: (i) spatial saliency guidance, which augments attention scores with the L2 norm of hidden states to better preserve semantically important visual tokens, and (ii) temporal redundancy scoring, which projects previous frames' keys onto the current frame's key subspace to preferentially prune redundant history. Across standard GUI agent benchmarks and models, GUI-KV outperforms competitive KV compression baselines, closely matching full-cache accuracy at modest budgets. Notably, in a 5-screenshot setting on the AgentNetBench benchmark, GUI-KV reduces decoding FLOPs by 38.9% while increasing step accuracy by 4.1% over the full-cache baseline. These results demonstrate that exploiting GUI-specific redundancies enables efficient and reliable agent performance.

L-GreCo: Layerwise-Adaptive Gradient Compression for Efficient and Accurate Deep Learning

Data-parallel distributed training of deep neural networks (DNN) has gained very widespread adoption, but can still experience communication bottlenecks. To address this issue, entire families of compression mechanisms have been developed, including quantization, sparsification, and low-rank approximation, some of which are seeing significant practical adoption. Despite this progress, almost all known compression schemes apply compression uniformly across DNN layers, although layers are heterogeneous in terms of parameter count and their impact on model accuracy. In this work, we provide a general framework for adapting the degree of compression across the model's layers dynamically during training, improving the overall compression, while leading to substantial speedups, without sacrificing accuracy. Our framework, called L-GreCo, is based on an adaptive algorithm, which automatically picks the optimal compression parameters for model layers guaranteeing the best compression ratio while satisfying an error constraint. Extensive experiments over image classification and language modeling tasks shows that L-GreCo is effective across all existing families of compression methods, and achieves up to 2.5times training speedup and up to 5times compression improvement over efficient implementations of existing approaches, while recovering full accuracy. Moreover, L-GreCo is complementary to existing adaptive algorithms, improving their compression ratio by 50% and practical throughput by 66%.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 31, 2022

EvoPress: Towards Optimal Dynamic Model Compression via Evolutionary Search

The high computational costs of large language models (LLMs) have led to a flurry of research on LLM compression, via methods such as quantization, sparsification, or structured pruning. A new frontier in this area is given by dynamic, non-uniform compression methods, which adjust the compression levels (e.g., sparsity) per-block or even per-layer in order to minimize accuracy loss, while guaranteeing a global compression threshold. Yet, current methods rely on heuristics for identifying the "importance" of a given layer towards the loss, based on assumptions such as error monotonicity, i.e. that the end-to-end model compression error is proportional to the sum of layer-wise errors. In this paper, we revisit this area, and propose a new and general approach for dynamic compression that is provably optimal in a given input range. We begin from the motivating observation that, in general, error monotonicity does not hold for LLMs: compressed models with lower sum of per-layer errors can perform worse than models with higher error sums. To address this, we propose a new general evolutionary framework for dynamic LLM compression called EvoPress, which has provable convergence, and low sample and evaluation complexity. We show that these theoretical guarantees lead to highly competitive practical performance for dynamic compression of Llama, Mistral and Phi models. Via EvoPress, we set new state-of-the-art results across all compression approaches: structural pruning (block/layer dropping), unstructured sparsity, as well as quantization with dynamic bitwidths. Our code is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/EvoPress.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 18, 2024 2

Deep Forcing: Training-Free Long Video Generation with Deep Sink and Participative Compression

Recent advances in autoregressive video diffusion have enabled real-time frame streaming, yet existing solutions still suffer from temporal repetition, drift, and motion deceleration. We find that naively applying StreamingLLM-style attention sinks to video diffusion leads to fidelity degradation and motion stagnation. To overcome this, we introduce Deep Forcing, which consists of two training-free mechanisms that address this without any fine-tuning. Specifically, 1) Deep Sink dedicates half of the sliding window to persistent sink tokens and re-aligns their temporal RoPE phase to the current timeline, stabilizing global context during long rollouts. 2) Participative Compression performs importance-aware KV cache pruning that preserves only tokens actively participating in recent attention while safely discarding redundant and degraded history, minimizing error accumulation under out-of-distribution length generation. Together, these components enable over 12x extrapolation (e.g. 5s-trained to 60s+ generation) with better imaging quality than LongLive, better aesthetic quality than RollingForcing, almost maintaining overall consistency, and substantial gains in dynamic degree, all while maintaining real-time generation. Our results demonstrate that training-free KV-cache management can match or exceed training-based approaches for autoregressively streaming long-video generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 4 2

LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS

Recent advancements in real-time neural rendering using point-based techniques have paved the way for the widespread adoption of 3D representations. However, foundational approaches like 3D Gaussian Splatting come with a substantial storage overhead caused by growing the SfM points to millions, often demanding gigabyte-level disk space for a single unbounded scene, posing significant scalability challenges and hindering the splatting efficiency. To address this challenge, we introduce LightGaussian, a novel method designed to transform 3D Gaussians into a more efficient and compact format. Drawing inspiration from the concept of Network Pruning, LightGaussian identifies Gaussians that are insignificant in contributing to the scene reconstruction and adopts a pruning and recovery process, effectively reducing redundancy in Gaussian counts while preserving visual effects. Additionally, LightGaussian employs distillation and pseudo-view augmentation to distill spherical harmonics to a lower degree, allowing knowledge transfer to more compact representations while maintaining reflectance. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid scheme, VecTree Quantization, to quantize all attributes, resulting in lower bitwidth representations with minimal accuracy losses. In summary, LightGaussian achieves an averaged compression rate over 15x while boosting the FPS from 139 to 215, enabling an efficient representation of complex scenes on Mip-NeRF 360, Tank and Temple datasets. Project website: https://lightgaussian.github.io/

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 28, 2023

Squeeze3D: Your 3D Generation Model is Secretly an Extreme Neural Compressor

We propose Squeeze3D, a novel framework that leverages implicit prior knowledge learnt by existing pre-trained 3D generative models to compress 3D data at extremely high compression ratios. Our approach bridges the latent spaces between a pre-trained encoder and a pre-trained generation model through trainable mapping networks. Any 3D model represented as a mesh, point cloud, or a radiance field is first encoded by the pre-trained encoder and then transformed (i.e. compressed) into a highly compact latent code. This latent code can effectively be used as an extremely compressed representation of the mesh or point cloud. A mapping network transforms the compressed latent code into the latent space of a powerful generative model, which is then conditioned to recreate the original 3D model (i.e. decompression). Squeeze3D is trained entirely on generated synthetic data and does not require any 3D datasets. The Squeeze3D architecture can be flexibly used with existing pre-trained 3D encoders and existing generative models. It can flexibly support different formats, including meshes, point clouds, and radiance fields. Our experiments demonstrate that Squeeze3D achieves compression ratios of up to 2187x for textured meshes, 55x for point clouds, and 619x for radiance fields while maintaining visual quality comparable to many existing methods. Squeeze3D only incurs a small compression and decompression latency since it does not involve training object-specific networks to compress an object.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 9 2

EMS: Adaptive Evict-then-Merge Strategy for Head-wise KV Cache Compression Based on Global-Local Importance

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, the demand for higher quality and faster processing of long contexts across various applications is growing. KV cache is widely adopted as it stores previously generated key and value tokens, effectively reducing redundant computations during inference. However, as memory overhead becomes a significant concern, efficient compression of KV cache has gained increasing attention. Most existing methods perform compression from two perspectives: identifying important tokens and designing compression strategies. However, these approaches often produce biased distributions of important tokens due to the influence of accumulated attention scores or positional encoding. Furthermore, they overlook the sparsity and redundancy across different heads, which leads to difficulties in preserving the most effective information at the head level. To this end, we propose EMS to overcome these limitations, while achieving better KV cache compression under extreme compression ratios. Specifically, we introduce a Global-Local score that combines accumulated attention scores from both global and local KV tokens to better identify the token importance. For the compression strategy, we design an adaptive and unified Evict-then-Merge framework that accounts for the sparsity and redundancy of KV tokens across different heads. Additionally, we implement the head-wise parallel compression through a zero-class mechanism to enhance efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate our SOTA performance even under extreme compression ratios. EMS consistently achieves the lowest perplexity, improves scores by over 1.28 points across four LLMs on LongBench under a 256 cache budget, and preserves 95% retrieval accuracy with a cache budget less than 2% of the context length in the Needle-in-a-Haystack task.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024

No Token Left Behind: Reliable KV Cache Compression via Importance-Aware Mixed Precision Quantization

Key-Value (KV) Caching has become an essential technique for accelerating the inference speed and throughput of generative Large Language Models~(LLMs). However, the memory footprint of the KV cache poses a critical bottleneck in LLM deployment as the cache size grows with batch size and sequence length, often surpassing even the size of the model itself. Although recent methods were proposed to select and evict unimportant KV pairs from the cache to reduce memory consumption, the potential ramifications of eviction on the generative process are yet to be thoroughly examined. In this paper, we examine the detrimental impact of cache eviction and observe that unforeseen risks arise as the information contained in the KV pairs is exhaustively discarded, resulting in safety breaches, hallucinations, and context loss. Surprisingly, we find that preserving even a small amount of information contained in the evicted KV pairs via reduced precision quantization substantially recovers the incurred degradation. On the other hand, we observe that the important KV pairs must be kept at a relatively higher precision to safeguard the generation quality. Motivated by these observations, we propose Mixed-precision KV cache~(MiKV), a reliable cache compression method that simultaneously preserves the context details by retaining the evicted KV pairs in low-precision and ensure generation quality by keeping the important KV pairs in high-precision. Experiments on diverse benchmarks and LLM backbones show that our proposed method offers a state-of-the-art trade-off between compression ratio and performance, compared to other baselines.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 28, 2024

Optimized Minimal 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for real-time, high-performance rendering, enabling a wide range of applications. However, representing 3D scenes with numerous explicit Gaussian primitives imposes significant storage and memory overhead. Recent studies have shown that high-quality rendering can be achieved with a substantially reduced number of Gaussians when represented with high-precision attributes. Nevertheless, existing 3DGS compression methods still rely on a relatively large number of Gaussians, focusing primarily on attribute compression. This is because a smaller set of Gaussians becomes increasingly sensitive to lossy attribute compression, leading to severe quality degradation. Since the number of Gaussians is directly tied to computational costs, it is essential to reduce the number of Gaussians effectively rather than only optimizing storage. In this paper, we propose Optimized Minimal Gaussians representation (OMG), which significantly reduces storage while using a minimal number of primitives. First, we determine the distinct Gaussian from the near ones, minimizing redundancy without sacrificing quality. Second, we propose a compact and precise attribute representation that efficiently captures both continuity and irregularity among primitives. Additionally, we propose a sub-vector quantization technique for improved irregularity representation, maintaining fast training with a negligible codebook size. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OMG reduces storage requirements by nearly 50% compared to the previous state-of-the-art and enables 600+ FPS rendering while maintaining high rendering quality. Our source code is available at https://maincold2.github.io/omg/.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 21 2

Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting for Static and Dynamic Radiance Fields

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an alternative representation that leverages a 3D Gaussian-based representation and introduces an approximated volumetric rendering, achieving very fast rendering speed and promising image quality. Furthermore, subsequent studies have successfully extended 3DGS to dynamic 3D scenes, demonstrating its wide range of applications. However, a significant drawback arises as 3DGS and its following methods entail a substantial number of Gaussians to maintain the high fidelity of the rendered images, which requires a large amount of memory and storage. To address this critical issue, we place a specific emphasis on two key objectives: reducing the number of Gaussian points without sacrificing performance and compressing the Gaussian attributes, such as view-dependent color and covariance. To this end, we propose a learnable mask strategy that significantly reduces the number of Gaussians while preserving high performance. In addition, we propose a compact but effective representation of view-dependent color by employing a grid-based neural field rather than relying on spherical harmonics. Finally, we learn codebooks to compactly represent the geometric and temporal attributes by residual vector quantization. With model compression techniques such as quantization and entropy coding, we consistently show over 25x reduced storage and enhanced rendering speed compared to 3DGS for static scenes, while maintaining the quality of the scene representation. For dynamic scenes, our approach achieves more than 12x storage efficiency and retains a high-quality reconstruction compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for 3D scene representation, achieving high performance, fast training, compactness, and real-time rendering. Our project page is available at https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 7, 2024 3

Early Exit or Not: Resource-Efficient Blind Quality Enhancement for Compressed Images

Lossy image compression is pervasively conducted to save communication bandwidth, resulting in undesirable compression artifacts. Recently, extensive approaches have been proposed to reduce image compression artifacts at the decoder side; however, they require a series of architecture-identical models to process images with different quality, which are inefficient and resource-consuming. Besides, it is common in practice that compressed images are with unknown quality and it is intractable for existing approaches to select a suitable model for blind quality enhancement. In this paper, we propose a resource-efficient blind quality enhancement (RBQE) approach for compressed images. Specifically, our approach blindly and progressively enhances the quality of compressed images through a dynamic deep neural network (DNN), in which an early-exit strategy is embedded. Then, our approach can automatically decide to terminate or continue enhancement according to the assessed quality of enhanced images. Consequently, slight artifacts can be removed in a simpler and faster process, while the severe artifacts can be further removed in a more elaborate process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RBQE approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both blind quality enhancement and resource efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanXingQL/RBQE.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 30, 2020

Once-for-All: Controllable Generative Image Compression with Dynamic Granularity Adaptation

Although recent generative image compression methods have demonstrated impressive potential in optimizing the rate-distortion-perception trade-off, they still face the critical challenge of flexible rate adaption to diverse compression necessities and scenarios. To overcome this challenge, this paper proposes a Controllable Generative Image Compression framework, termed Control-GIC, the first capable of fine-grained bitrate adaption across a broad spectrum while ensuring high-fidelity and generality compression. Control-GIC is grounded in a VQGAN framework that encodes an image as a sequence of variable-length codes (i.e. VQ-indices), which can be losslessly compressed and exhibits a direct positive correlation with the bitrates. Drawing inspiration from the classical coding principle, we correlate the information density of local image patches with their granular representations. Hence, we can flexibly determine a proper allocation of granularity for the patches to achieve dynamic adjustment for VQ-indices, resulting in desirable compression rates. We further develop a probabilistic conditional decoder capable of retrieving historic encoded multi-granularity representations according to transmitted codes, and then reconstruct hierarchical granular features in the formalization of conditional probability, enabling more informative aggregation to improve reconstruction realism. Our experiments show that Control-GIC allows highly flexible and controllable bitrate adaption where the results demonstrate its superior performance over recent state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/lianqi1008/Control-GIC.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 2, 2024

Model Tells You Where to Merge: Adaptive KV Cache Merging for LLMs on Long-Context Tasks

How to efficiently serve Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a pressing issue because of their huge computational cost in their autoregressive generation process. To mitigate computational costs, LLMs often employ the KV Cache technique to improve the generation speed. While improving the computational efficiency, the storage requirements of the KV cache are substantial, particularly in long-context scenarios, leading to significant memory consumption. Existing KV cache eviction methods often degrade the performance of LLMs in long-context scenarios due to the information loss introduced by eviction. In this paper, we propose a novel KV cache merging approach, called KVMerger, to achieve adaptive KV cache compression for long-context tasks without significant performance degradation under constrained memory budgets. Our approach is inspired by the intriguing observation that key states exhibit high similarity at the token level within a single sequence. To facilitate merging, we develop an effective yet straightforward merging set identification algorithm to identify suitable KV states for merging. Our merging set identification algorithm stimulates the second observation that KV cache sparsity, from similarity perspective, is independent of the dataset and remains persistent at the model level. Subsequently, we propose a Gaussian kernel weighted merging algorithm to selectively merge all states within each merging set. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of KVMerger for long-context tasks under constrained memory budgets, applying it to models including Llama2-7B-chat and Llama2-13B-chat. Using the LongBench and ZeroScroll benchmarks, we compare our method with other KV cache compression techniques, including H2O and CaM, showing that our method achieves superior performance across tasks with both 50% and 35% KV cache budgets.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024

KIVI: A Tuning-Free Asymmetric 2bit Quantization for KV Cache

Efficiently serving large language models (LLMs) requires batching many requests together to reduce the cost per request. Yet, the key-value (KV) cache, which stores attention keys and values to avoid re-computations, significantly increases memory demands and becomes the new bottleneck in speed and memory usage. This memory demand increases with larger batch sizes and longer context lengths. Additionally, the inference speed is limited by the size of KV cache, as the GPU's SRAM must load the entire KV cache from the main GPU memory for each token generated, causing the computational core to be idle during this process. A straightforward and effective solution to reduce KV cache size is quantization, which decreases the total bytes taken by KV cache. However, there is a lack of in-depth studies that explore the element distribution of KV cache to understand the hardness and limitation of KV cache quantization. To fill the gap, we conducted a comprehensive study on the element distribution in KV cache of popular LLMs. Our findings indicate that the key cache should be quantized per-channel, i.e., group elements along the channel dimension and quantize them together. In contrast, the value cache should be quantized per-token. From this analysis, we developed a tuning-free 2bit KV cache quantization algorithm, named KIVI. With the hardware-friendly implementation, KIVI can enable Llama (Llama-2), Falcon, and Mistral models to maintain almost the same quality while using 2.6times less peak memory usage (including the model weight). This reduction in memory usage enables up to 4times larger batch size, bringing 2.35times sim 3.47times throughput on real LLM inference workload. The source code is available at https://github.com/jy-yuan/KIVI.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024 1

Head-Aware KV Cache Compression for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models have emerged as a powerful approach for multi-modal content creation, offering high efficiency and quality across diverse multimedia applications. However, they face significant memory bottlenecks due to extensive KV cache accumulation during inference. Existing KV cache compression techniques for large language models are suboptimal for VAR models due to, as we identify in this paper, two distinct categories of attention heads in VAR models: Structural Heads, which preserve spatial coherence through diagonal attention patterns, and Contextual Heads, which maintain semantic consistency through vertical attention patterns. These differences render single-strategy KV compression techniques ineffective for VAR models. To address this, we propose HACK, a training-free Head-Aware Compression method for KV cache. HACK allocates asymmetric cache budgets and employs pattern-specific compression strategies tailored to the essential characteristics of each head category. Experiments on Infinity-2B, Infinity-8B, and VAR-d30 demonstrate its effectiveness in text-to-image and class-conditional generation tasks. HACK can hack down up to 50\% and 70\% of cache with minimal performance degradation for VAR-d30 and Infinity-8B, respectively. Even with 70\% and 90\% KV cache compression in VAR-d30 and Infinity-8B, HACK still maintains high-quality generation while reducing memory usage by 44.2\% and 58.9\%, respectively.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 12

MiniCache: KV Cache Compression in Depth Dimension for Large Language Models

A critical approach for efficiently deploying computationally demanding large language models (LLMs) is Key-Value (KV) caching. The KV cache stores key-value states of previously generated tokens, significantly reducing the need for repetitive computations and thereby lowering latency in autoregressive generation. However, the size of the KV cache grows linearly with sequence length, posing challenges for applications requiring long context input and extensive sequence generation. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach, called MiniCache, to compress the KV cache across layers from a novel depth perspective, significantly reducing the memory footprint for LLM inference. Our approach is based on the observation that KV cache states exhibit high similarity between the adjacent layers in the middle-to-deep portion of LLMs. To facilitate merging, we propose disentangling the states into the magnitude and direction components, interpolating the directions of the state vectors while preserving their lengths unchanged. Furthermore, we introduce a token retention strategy to keep highly distinct state pairs unmerged, thus preserving the information with minimal additional storage overhead. Our MiniCache is training-free and general, complementing existing KV cache compression strategies, such as quantization and sparsity. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of MiniCache utilizing various models including LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3, Phi-3, Mistral, and Mixtral across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating its exceptional performance in achieving superior compression ratios and high throughput. On the ShareGPT dataset, LLaMA-2-7B with 4-bit MiniCache achieves a remarkable compression ratio of up to 5.02x, enhances inference throughput by approximately 5x, and reduces the memory footprint by 41% compared to the FP16 full cache baseline, all while maintaining near-lossless performance.

  • 6 authors
·
May 23, 2024 2

Lossless Compression with Probabilistic Circuits

Despite extensive progress on image generation, common deep generative model architectures are not easily applied to lossless compression. For example, VAEs suffer from a compression cost overhead due to their latent variables. This overhead can only be partially eliminated with elaborate schemes such as bits-back coding, often resulting in poor single-sample compression rates. To overcome such problems, we establish a new class of tractable lossless compression models that permit efficient encoding and decoding: Probabilistic Circuits (PCs). These are a class of neural networks involving |p| computational units that support efficient marginalization over arbitrary subsets of the D feature dimensions, enabling efficient arithmetic coding. We derive efficient encoding and decoding schemes that both have time complexity O (log(D) cdot |p|), where a naive scheme would have linear costs in D and |p|, making the approach highly scalable. Empirically, our PC-based (de)compression algorithm runs 5-40 times faster than neural compression algorithms that achieve similar bitrates. By scaling up the traditional PC structure learning pipeline, we achieve state-of-the-art results on image datasets such as MNIST. Furthermore, PCs can be naturally integrated with existing neural compression algorithms to improve the performance of these base models on natural image datasets. Our results highlight the potential impact that non-standard learning architectures may have on neural data compression.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 22, 2021

SCBench: A KV Cache-Centric Analysis of Long-Context Methods

Long-context LLMs have enabled numerous downstream applications but also introduced significant challenges related to computational and memory efficiency. To address these challenges, optimizations for long-context inference have been developed, centered around the KV cache. However, existing benchmarks often evaluate in single-request, neglecting the full lifecycle of the KV cache in real-world use. This oversight is particularly critical, as KV cache reuse has become widely adopted in LLMs inference frameworks, such as vLLM and SGLang, as well as by LLM providers, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic. To address this gap, we introduce SCBench(SharedContextBench), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating long-context methods from a KV cachecentric perspective: 1) KV cache generation, 2) KV cache compression, 3) KV cache retrieval, 4) KV cache loading. Specifically, SCBench uses test examples with shared context, ranging 12 tasks with two shared context modes, covering four categories of long-context capabilities: string retrieval, semantic retrieval, global information, and multi-task. With it, we provide an extensive KV cache-centric analysis of eight categories long-context solutions, including Gated Linear RNNs, Mamba-Attention hybrids, and efficient methods such as sparse attention, KV cache dropping, quantization, retrieval, loading, and prompt compression. The evaluation is conducted on 8 long-context LLMs. Our findings show that sub-O(n) memory methods suffer in multi-turn scenarios, while sparse encoding with O(n) memory and sub-O(n^2) pre-filling computation perform robustly. Dynamic sparsity yields more expressive KV caches than static patterns, and layer-level sparsity in hybrid architectures reduces memory usage with strong performance. Additionally, we identify attention distribution shift issues in long-generation scenarios. https://aka.ms/SCBench.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024 2

eDKM: An Efficient and Accurate Train-time Weight Clustering for Large Language Models

Since Large Language Models or LLMs have demonstrated high-quality performance on many complex language tasks, there is a great interest in bringing these LLMs to mobile devices for faster responses and better privacy protection. However, the size of LLMs (i.e., billions of parameters) requires highly effective compression to fit into storage-limited devices. Among many compression techniques, weight-clustering, a form of non-linear quantization, is one of the leading candidates for LLM compression, and supported by modern smartphones. Yet, its training overhead is prohibitively significant for LLM fine-tuning. Especially, Differentiable KMeans Clustering, or DKM, has shown the state-of-the-art trade-off between compression ratio and accuracy regression, but its large memory complexity makes it nearly impossible to apply to train-time LLM compression. In this paper, we propose a memory-efficient DKM implementation, eDKM powered by novel techniques to reduce the memory footprint of DKM by orders of magnitudes. For a given tensor to be saved on CPU for the backward pass of DKM, we compressed the tensor by applying uniquification and sharding after checking if there is no duplicated tensor previously copied to CPU. Our experimental results demonstrate that \prjname can fine-tune and compress a pretrained LLaMA 7B model from 12.6 GB to 2.5 GB (3bit/weight) with the Alpaca dataset by reducing the train-time memory footprint of a decoder layer by 130times, while delivering good accuracy on broader LLM benchmarks (i.e., 77.7% for PIQA, 66.1% for Winograde, and so on).

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 2, 2023

Large Motion Video Autoencoding with Cross-modal Video VAE

Learning a robust video Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is essential for reducing video redundancy and facilitating efficient video generation. Directly applying image VAEs to individual frames in isolation can result in temporal inconsistencies and suboptimal compression rates due to a lack of temporal compression. Existing Video VAEs have begun to address temporal compression; however, they often suffer from inadequate reconstruction performance. In this paper, we present a novel and powerful video autoencoder capable of high-fidelity video encoding. First, we observe that entangling spatial and temporal compression by merely extending the image VAE to a 3D VAE can introduce motion blur and detail distortion artifacts. Thus, we propose temporal-aware spatial compression to better encode and decode the spatial information. Additionally, we integrate a lightweight motion compression model for further temporal compression. Second, we propose to leverage the textual information inherent in text-to-video datasets and incorporate text guidance into our model. This significantly enhances reconstruction quality, particularly in terms of detail preservation and temporal stability. Third, we further improve the versatility of our model through joint training on both images and videos, which not only enhances reconstruction quality but also enables the model to perform both image and video autoencoding. Extensive evaluations against strong recent baselines demonstrate the superior performance of our method. The project website can be found at~https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/{https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/}.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 23, 2024 3

MLICv2: Enhanced Multi-Reference Entropy Modeling for Learned Image Compression

Recent advancements in learned image compression (LIC) have yielded impressive performance gains. Notably, the learned image compression models with multi-reference entropy models (MLIC series) have significantly outperformed existing traditional image codecs such as the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) Intra. In this paper, we present MLICv2 and MLICv2^+, enhanced versions of the MLIC series, featuring improved transform techniques, entropy modeling, and instance adaptability. For better transform, we introduce a simple token mixing transform block inspired by the meta transformer architecture, addressing the performance degradation at high bit-rates observed in previous MLIC series while maintaining computational efficiency. To enhance entropy modeling, we propose a hyperprior-guided global correlation prediction, enabling the capture of global contexts in the initial slice of the latent representation. We also develop a channel reweighting module to dynamically prioritize important channels within each context. Additionally, advanced positional embedding for context modeling and selective compression with guided optimization are investigated. To boost instance adaptability, we employ stochastic Gumbel annealing to iteratively refine the latent representation according to the rate-distortion optimization of a specific input image. This approach further enhances performance without impacting decoding speed. Experimental results demonstrate that our MLICv2 and MLICv2^+ achieve state-of-the-art performance, reducing Bjontegaard-Delta rate (BD-rate) by 16.54%, 21.61%, 16.05% and 20.46%, 24.35%, 19.14% respectively, compared to VTM-17.0 Intra on the Kodak, Tecnick, CLIC Pro Val dataset, respectively.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 27

EControl: Fast Distributed Optimization with Compression and Error Control

Modern distributed training relies heavily on communication compression to reduce the communication overhead. In this work, we study algorithms employing a popular class of contractive compressors in order to reduce communication overhead. However, the naive implementation often leads to unstable convergence or even exponential divergence due to the compression bias. Error Compensation (EC) is an extremely popular mechanism to mitigate the aforementioned issues during the training of models enhanced by contractive compression operators. Compared to the effectiveness of EC in the data homogeneous regime, the understanding of the practicality and theoretical foundations of EC in the data heterogeneous regime is limited. Existing convergence analyses typically rely on strong assumptions such as bounded gradients, bounded data heterogeneity, or large batch accesses, which are often infeasible in modern machine learning applications. We resolve the majority of current issues by proposing EControl, a novel mechanism that can regulate error compensation by controlling the strength of the feedback signal. We prove fast convergence for EControl in standard strongly convex, general convex, and nonconvex settings without any additional assumptions on the problem or data heterogeneity. We conduct extensive numerical evaluations to illustrate the efficacy of our method and support our theoretical findings.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 6, 2023

CompressKV: Semantic Retrieval Heads Know What Tokens are Not Important Before Generation

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted long-context processing. However, the increasing key-value (KV) cache size poses critical challenges to memory and execution efficiency. Most KV cache compression methods rely on heuristic token eviction using all attention heads in Grouped Query Attention (GQA)-based LLMs. This method ignores the different functionalities of attention heads, leading to the eviction of critical tokens and thus degrades the performance of LLMs. To address the issue above, instead of using all the attention heads in GQA-based LLMs to determine important tokens as in the previous work, we first identify the attention heads in each layer that are not only capable of retrieving the initial and final tokens of a prompt, but also capable of retrieving important tokens within the text and attending to their surrounding semantic context. Afterwards, we exploit such heads to determine the important tokens and retain their corresponding KV cache pairs. Furthermore, we analyze the cache eviction error of each layer individually and introduce a layer-adaptive KV cache allocation strategy. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed CompressKV consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under various memory budgets on LongBench and Needle-in-a-Haystack benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/TUDa-HWAI/CompressKV.git.

  • 6 authors
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Aug 4

LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion

We introduce LTX-Video, a transformer-based latent diffusion model that adopts a holistic approach to video generation by seamlessly integrating the responsibilities of the Video-VAE and the denoising transformer. Unlike existing methods, which treat these components as independent, LTX-Video aims to optimize their interaction for improved efficiency and quality. At its core is a carefully designed Video-VAE that achieves a high compression ratio of 1:192, with spatiotemporal downscaling of 32 x 32 x 8 pixels per token, enabled by relocating the patchifying operation from the transformer's input to the VAE's input. Operating in this highly compressed latent space enables the transformer to efficiently perform full spatiotemporal self-attention, which is essential for generating high-resolution videos with temporal consistency. However, the high compression inherently limits the representation of fine details. To address this, our VAE decoder is tasked with both latent-to-pixel conversion and the final denoising step, producing the clean result directly in pixel space. This approach preserves the ability to generate fine details without incurring the runtime cost of a separate upsampling module. Our model supports diverse use cases, including text-to-video and image-to-video generation, with both capabilities trained simultaneously. It achieves faster-than-real-time generation, producing 5 seconds of 24 fps video at 768x512 resolution in just 2 seconds on an Nvidia H100 GPU, outperforming all existing models of similar scale. The source code and pre-trained models are publicly available, setting a new benchmark for accessible and scalable video generation.

  • 16 authors
·
Dec 30, 2024 4

BlockVid: Block Diffusion for High-Quality and Consistent Minute-Long Video Generation

Generating minute-long videos is a critical step toward developing world models, providing a foundation for realistic extended scenes and advanced AI simulators. The emerging semi-autoregressive (block diffusion) paradigm integrates the strengths of diffusion and autoregressive models, enabling arbitrary-length video generation and improving inference efficiency through KV caching and parallel sampling. However, it yet faces two enduring challenges: (i) KV-cache-induced long-horizon error accumulation, and (ii) the lack of fine-grained long-video benchmarks and coherence-aware metrics. To overcome these limitations, we propose BlockVid, a novel block diffusion framework equipped with semantic-aware sparse KV cache, an effective training strategy called Block Forcing, and dedicated chunk-wise noise scheduling and shuffling to reduce error propagation and enhance temporal consistency. We further introduce LV-Bench, a fine-grained benchmark for minute-long videos, complete with new metrics evaluating long-range coherence. Extensive experiments on VBench and LV-Bench demonstrate that BlockVid consistently outperforms existing methods in generating high-quality, coherent minute-long videos. In particular, it achieves a 22.2% improvement on VDE Subject and a 19.4% improvement on VDE Clarity in LV-Bench over the state of the art approaches. Project website: https://ziplab.co/BlockVid. Inferix (Code): https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/Inferix.

Alibaba-DAMO-Academy DAMO Academy
·
Nov 28 2

The KoLMogorov Test: Compression by Code Generation

Compression is at the heart of intelligence. A theoretically optimal way to compress any sequence of data is to find the shortest program that outputs that sequence and then halts. However, such 'Kolmogorov compression' is uncomputable, and code generating LLMs struggle to approximate this theoretical ideal, as it requires reasoning, planning and search capabilities beyond those of current models. In this work, we introduce the KoLMogorov-Test (KT), a compression-as-intelligence test for code generating LLMs. In KT a model is presented with a sequence of data at inference time, and asked to generate the shortest program that produces the sequence. We identify several benefits of KT for both evaluation and training: an essentially infinite number of problem instances of varying difficulty is readily available, strong baselines already exist, the evaluation metric (compression) cannot be gamed, and pretraining data contamination is highly unlikely. To evaluate current models, we use audio, text, and DNA data, as well as sequences produced by random synthetic programs. Current flagship models perform poorly - both GPT4-o and Llama-3.1-405B struggle on our natural and synthetic sequences. On our synthetic distribution, we are able to train code generation models with lower compression rates than previous approaches. Moreover, we show that gains on synthetic data generalize poorly to real data, suggesting that new innovations are necessary for additional gains on KT.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 18