MuKV: Multi-Grained KV Cache Compression for Long Streaming Video Question-Answering

Official PyTorch implementation of "MuKV: Multi-Grained KV Cache Compression for Long Streaming Video Question-Answering" [CVPR'26].

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💡 Overview

Efficiently and accurately responsing to user questions over long, live video streams (either third-person view or first-person view) remains challenging, especially when the questions involve fine-grained details in the far past. Existing sparse sampling and sliding window approaches often trade-off visual details for efficiency. Video KV-cache memory provides a good alternative, but per-frame caching not only neglects information granularity but also brings heavy redanducy. We thus propose MuKV, a multi-grained KV-cache compression approach designed to improve streaming VideoQA. We highlight the followings:

• Multi-Grained Context: Represent past videos in hierarchically compressed KV tokens at segment, frame, and patch levels.
• Redundancy Minimization: Adaptively trim irrelevant tokens utilizing token attention importance and frequency signal.
• Efficiency and Accuracy: Significantly improved QA accuracy, without sacrificing offline memory and online QA efficiency. The strength gets boosted as video length increases.

Figure 1: A comparison with ReKV under different online inference token count and video lengths.

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🚀 Getting Started

1. Environment Setup

We provide a convenient bash script to setup the exact dependencies and isolated conda environment automatically.

# It will create a conda env named 'mukv', install torch, flash-attn, transformers, etc.
bash prepare.sh

Activate the environment before proceeding:

conda activate mukv

2. Model Preparation

The core scripts are adapted to run across several Large Vision/Language models (e.g. LLaVA-OneVision).

We support the official LLaVA-OneVision weights on Hugging Face:

• 0.5B Model: https://huggingface.co/llava-hf/llava-onevision-qwen2-0.5b-ov-hf

By default, the code points to the 0.5B instance. The transformers library will download the weights automatically when you first run the server. You may also specify any other pre-downloaded local path using the --model_path argument.

3. Data Preparation

We conduct experiments primarily on RVS-Ego and RVS-Movie (MovieNet).

1. RVS-Ego & RVS-Movie: We follow the original Real-Time VideoQA benchmarks. Annotations and instructions can be obtained from the RVS Dataset Hugging Face repository.

Structure the annotations (.json/.csv) and video tensors (.npy/.mp4) inside the data/ directory exactly as shown below:

MuKV/
├── scripts/                # Execution Logic
├── model/                  # MuKV Implementation
├── assets/                 # Readme Images
├── data/
│   ├── rvs/
│   │   ├── ego/
│   │   │   ├── ego4d_oe.json
│   │   │   └── videos_npy_2fps/ (or videos/)
│   │   └── movie/
│   │       ├── movienet_oe.json
│   │       └── videos_npy/ (or videos/)

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⚡ Inference & Evaluation

We abstract the entry points into simple run_mukv_<dataset>.py handlers inside the scripts/ folder. You must execute all python commands directly from the root MuKV/ directory.

Evaluate on RVS-Ego (Open-Ended)

python scripts/run_mukv_rvs_ego.py \
    --model_path "llava-hf/llava-onevision-qwen2-0.5b-ov-hf" \
    --anno_path "data/rvs/ego/ego4d_oe.json" \
    --video_format "mp4" \
    --enable_compression true \
    --enable_rerank true

Evaluate on RVS-Movie (Open-Ended)

python scripts/run_mukv_rvs_movie.py \
    --model_path "llava-hf/llava-onevision-qwen2-0.5b-ov-hf" \
    --anno_path "data/rvs/movie/movienet_oe.json" \
    --enable_compression true

Logs, resulting prediction CSVs, and inference time memory stat snapshots will automatically be collected under the generated results/mukv/ log directory.

Running via Shell Scripts

If you want to run exactly configured end-to-end evaluations without manually copying command-line arguments, you can directly execute the ready-made shell scripts inside scripts/sh/:

bash scripts/sh/run_mukv_rvs_ego.sh

Cite

@article{xiao2026mukv,
  title={MuKV: Multi-Grained KV Cache Compression for Long Streaming Video Question-Answering},
  author={Xiao, Junbin and Chen, Jiajun and Sun, Tianxiang and Yang, Xun and Yao, Angela},
  booktitle={IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
  year={2026}
}

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🙏 Acknowledgements

Our methodology expands upon the impressive foundation set by LLaVA-OneVision. We thank the authors for their open-source contributions.