# UniCache: Task- and Type-Aware KV Cache Compression for Unified Multimodal Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32831 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32831/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in KV cache optimization, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 24 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [KV cache optimization](https://mlsanity.com/inference/kv-cache-optimization/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [H2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14048/) (2023)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Fast Transformer Decoding: One Write-Head is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02150/) (2019)
- [KIVI: A Tuning-Free Asymmetric 2bit Quantization for KV Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02750/) (2024)
- [Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11039/) (2024)
- [Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13848/) (2024)
- [Scissorhands: Exploiting the Persistence of Importance Hypothesis for LLM KV Cache Compression at Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17118/) (2023)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [Mixture-of-Transformers: A Sparse and Scalable Architecture for Multi-Modal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04996/) (2024)
- [Direct Inversion: Boosting Diffusion-based Editing with 3 Lines of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01506/) (2023)
- [ZipVL: Efficient Large Vision-Language Models with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08584/) (2024)
- [VL-Cache: Sparsity and Modality-Aware KV Cache Compression for Vision-Language Model Inference Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23317/) (2024)
- [DiffKV: Differentiated Memory Management for Large Language Models with Parallel KV Compaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03131/) (2024)
- [Hyper-Bagel: A Unified Acceleration Framework for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18824/) (2025)
- [AlphaQ: Calibration-Free Bit Allocation for Mixture-of-Experts Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04980/) (2026)
- [Flash-Unified: A Training-Free and Task-Aware Acceleration Framework for Native Unified Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15271/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unified multimodal models combine understanding, generation, and editing within a single network, offering a promising foundation for versatile multimodal applications. However, growing multimodal contexts make KV cache storage and access increasingly costly. Existing KV cache compression methods are typically tailored to specific tasks and single-modality caches, while overlooking changes in cache importance across tasks and timesteps. However, in unified multimodal models, each task involves multiple KV cache types, and both their composition and dynamics differ across tasks. As a result, a single compression policy overlooks task- and type-specific requirements, leading to the loss of critical information and degraded quality across tasks. Based on these findings, we propose UniCache, a training-free framework for task- and type-aware KV cache compression. UniCache identifies the cache segments activated by each task and assigns suitable compression policies through offline calibration. It coordinates their parallel execution under a shared storage budget through attention-guided allocation and task-aware temporal scheduling. Experiments show that UniCache achieves 5× KV cache compression for understanding and editing and 2.5× for generation with negligible quality loss, while increasing throughput by up to 1.78× in long-context settings, significantly improving the practicality of scaling unified multimodal models to longer context.