# CalibQuant: 1-Bit KV Cache Quantization for Multimodal LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14882 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14882/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Visual token pruning and efficiency, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 33 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Visual token pruning and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/visual-token-pruning-and-efficiency/)
- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [KV cache quantization](https://mlsanity.com/inference/kv-cache-quantization/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06066/) (2024)
- [H2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14048/) (2023)
- [An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06764/) (2024)
- [KIVI: A Tuning-Free Asymmetric 2bit Quantization for KV Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02750/) (2024)
- [KVQuant: Towards 10 Million Context Length LLM Inference with KV Cache Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18079/) (2024)
- [PyramidKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression based on Pyramidal Information Funneling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02069/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-PruMerge: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15388/) (2024)
- [MLLM-as-a-Judge: Assessing Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge with Vision-Language Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04788/) (2024)
- [Mini-Gemini: Mining the Potential of Multi-modality Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18814/) (2024)
- [MoE-LLaVA: Mixture of Experts for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15947/) (2024)
- [PyramidDrop: Accelerating Your Large Vision-Language Models via Pyramid Visual Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17247/) (2024)
- [Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17432/) (2023)
- [Integer Quantization for Deep Learning Inference: Principles and Empirical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09602/) (2020)
- [MMBench-Video: A Long-Form Multi-Shot Benchmark for Holistic Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14515/) (2024)
- [MobileVLM V2: Faster and Stronger Baseline for Vision Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03766/) (2024)
- [LLM Maybe LongLM: Self-Extend LLM Context Window Without Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01325/) (2024)
- [MobileVLM : A Fast, Strong and Open Vision Language Assistant for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16886/) (2023)
- [LOOK-M: Look-Once Optimization in KV Cache for Efficient Multimodal Long-Context Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18139/) (2024)
- [QJL: 1-Bit Quantized JL Transform for KV Cache Quantization with Zero Overhead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03482/) (2024)
- [VL-Cache: Sparsity and Modality-Aware KV Cache Compression for Vision-Language Model Inference Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23317/) (2024)
- [Diversifying the Expert Knowledge for Task-Agnostic Pruning in Sparse Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09590/) (2024)
- [PolarQuant: Quantizing KV Caches with Polar Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02617/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [ThinKV: Thought-Adaptive KV Cache Compression for Efficient Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01290/) (2025)
- [Seen, Said, or Forgotten? A Causal Audit of Visual KV Memory Across Dialog Turns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25467/) (2026)
- [KVCapsule: Efficient Sequential KV Cache Compression for Vision-Language Models with Asymmetric Redundancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16439/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse applications. However, their computational overhead during deployment remains a critical bottleneck. While Key-Value (KV) caching effectively trades memory for computation to enhance inference efficiency, the growing memory footprint from extensive KV caches significantly reduces throughput and restricts prolonged deployment on memory-constrained GPU devices. To address this challenge, we propose CalibQuant, a simple yet highly effective visual quantization strategy that drastically reduces both memory and computational overhead. Specifically, CalibQuant introduces an extreme 1-bit quantization scheme, complemented by novel post-scaling and calibration techniques tailored to the intrinsic patterns of KV caches, thereby ensuring high efficiency without compromising model performance. Leveraging Triton for runtime optimization, we achieve a 10x throughput increase on InternVL models. Our method is designed to be plug-and-play, seamlessly integrating with various existing MLLMs without requiring architectural changes. Extensive experiments confirm that our approach significantly reduces memory usage while maintaining computational efficiency and preserving multimodal capabilities. Codes are available at https://github.com/insuhan/calibquant.