MM-ShiftKV: Decode-Aware Prefill-Stage KV Selection for Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract

Key-Value (KV) caching is essential for efficient inference in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), yet its memory footprint grows linearly with context length and becomes a major bottleneck due to the large number of visual tokens. Recent prefill-stage KV selection methods estimate KV importance from prefilling statistics, implicitly assuming that prefilling-time queries are representative of those encountered during decoding. We show that this assumption breaks down in multimodal inference, where decoding-time queries exhibit substantially larger variance than prefilling-stage representations, leading to unstable KV importance estimation under tight cache budgets. As a result, small ranking errors can disproportionately discard semantically critical visual tokens and degrade grounding and reasoning performance. We propose MM-ShiftKV, a training-free, decode-aware and strictly prefill-only KV selection method. MM-ShiftKV approximates decoding-time query behavior during prefilling by constructing variance-expanded query proxies and estimates prompt KV importance based on their aggregated attention mass. Experiments on multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that MM-ShiftKV consistently outperforms existing methods under strict KV-cache budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjuDBxAI/MM-ShiftKV.