Forcing-KV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models

Yicheng Ji1,2 Zhizhou Zhong2,3 Jun Zhang1 Qin Yang2 Xitai Jin2
Ying Qin4 Wenhan Luo3 Shuiyang Mao2 Wei Liu2 Huan Li1
1ZJU 2Video Rebirth 3HKUST 4BJTU

Overview

Over 29 FPS with 30% cache memory reduction, up to 1.35× and 1.50× speedups on LongLive and Self Forcing at 480P resolution, and 2.82× at 1080P resolution.

Forcing-KV teaser figure

Method

We apply static structural pruning and dynamic similarity pruning to different heads, accelerating inference, reducing cache memory while improving quality.

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