Panpan Xu

Dezhan Tu, Danylo Vashchilenko, Yuzhe Lu et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across a versatile set of tasks. A key challenge in accelerating VLMs is storing and accessing the large Key-Value (KV) cache that encodes long visual contexts, such as images or videos. While existing KV cache compression methods are effective for Large Language Models (LLMs), directly migrating them to VLMs yields suboptimal accuracy and speedup. To bridge the gap, we propose VL-Cache, a novel KV cache compression recipe tailored for accelerating VLM inference. In this paper, we first investigate the unique sparsity pattern of VLM attention by distinguishing visual and text tokens in prefill and decoding phases. Based on these observations, we introduce a layer-adaptive sparsity-aware cache budget allocation method that effectively distributes the limited cache budget across different layers, further reducing KV cache size without compromising accuracy. Additionally, we develop a modality-aware token scoring policy to better evaluate the token importance. Empirical results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that retaining only 10% of KV cache achieves accuracy comparable to that with full cache. In a speed benchmark, our method accelerates end-to-end latency of generating 100 tokens by up to 2.33x and speeds up decoding by up to 7.08x, while reducing the memory footprint of KV cache in GPU by 90%.

Shulong Li, Panpan Xu, Bin Li et al.

To predict lung nodule malignancy with a high sensitivity and specificity, we propose a fusion algorithm that combines handcrafted features (HF) into the features learned at the output layer of a 3D deep convolutional neural network (CNN). First, we extracted twenty-nine handcrafted features, including nine intensity features, eight geometric features, and twelve texture features based on grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) averaged from thirteen directions. We then trained 3D CNNs modified from three state-of-the-art 2D CNN architectures (AlexNet, VGG-16 Net and Multi-crop Net) to extract the CNN features learned at the output layer. For each 3D CNN, the CNN features combined with the 29 handcrafted features were used as the input for the support vector machine (SVM) coupled with the sequential forward feature selection (SFS) method to select the optimal feature subset and construct the classifiers. The fusion algorithm takes full advantage of the handcrafted features and the highest level CNN features learned at the output layer. It can overcome the disadvantage of the handcrafted features that may not fully reflect the unique characteristics of a particular lesion by combining the intrinsic CNN features. Meanwhile, it also alleviates the requirement of a large scale annotated dataset for the CNNs based on the complementary of handcrafted features. The patient cohort includes 431 malignant nodules and 795 benign nodules extracted from the LIDC/IDRI database. For each investigated CNN architecture, the proposed fusion algorithm achieved the highest AUC, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity scores among all competitive classification models.