Past- and Future-Informed KV Cache Policy with Salience Estimation in Autoregressive Video Diffusion

TL;DR

This paper introduces PaFu-KV, a salience-aware cache policy for autoregressive video generation that improves quality and efficiency by selectively retaining important tokens based on estimated salience scores.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel Past- and Future-Informed KV Cache Policy with a salience estimation head, enhancing token retention decisions in long-term video generation.

Findings

Improves video quality by retaining critical tokens.

Reduces memory footprint and accelerates inference.

Maintains high-fidelity video generation on benchmarks.

Abstract

Video generation is pivotal to digital media creation, and recent advances in autoregressive video generation have markedly enhanced the efficiency of real-time video synthesis. However, existing approaches generally rely on heuristic KV Cache policies, which ignore differences in token importance in long-term video generation. This leads to the loss of critical spatiotemporal information and the accumulation of redundant, invalid cache, thereby degrading video generation quality and efficiency. To address this limitation, we first observe that token contributions to video generation are highly time-heterogeneous and accordingly propose a novel Past- and Future-Informed KV Cache Policy (PaFu-KV). Specifically, PaFu-KV introduces a lightweight Salience Estimation Head distilled from a bidirectional teacher to estimate salience scores, allowing the KV cache to retain informative tokens while discarding less relevant ones. This policy yields a better quality-efficiency trade-off by shrinking KV cache capacity and reducing memory footprint at inference time. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our method preserves high-fidelity video generation quality while enables accelerated inference, thereby enabling more efficient long-horizon video generation. Our code will be released upon paper acceptance.