NanoKV: High-Ratio KV Cache Compression for Autoregressive Video Generation

Autoregressive video models rely on historical key–value (KV) caches to preserve scene consistency over extended rollouts, making KV storage and repeated attention over history a growing memory and computational bottleneck. Aggressive compression can degrade generation quality, while reconstructing full-dimensional KV leaves attention computation largely unchanged. We introduce NanoKV, a frozen-backbone framework for generation-aware high-ratio KV compression. NanoKV exploits redundancy across tokens and attention heads by storing shared content in cluster centers and encoding joint head–channel residuals into low-bit coefficients. Crucially, NanoKV uses different fitting objectives for Keys and Values according to their distinct roles in attention: Key decoders are optimized to preserve downstream block outputs, whereas Value encoders and decoders are fitted for faithful reconstruction through the deployed quantization path. Building on the same compressed representation, the optional NanoKV-Fast variant reuses the stored coefficients for mixed-dimensional attention, reducing computation without modifying the video backbone. Across three autoregressive video backbones, NanoKV consistently improves the quality–storage trade-off. On HY-WorldPlay, NanoKV achieves 26.09× effective KV compression—nearly twice that of KVTC—while improving PSNR by 1.0 dB. NanoKV-Fast retains 20.53× effective compression and achieves an approximately 1.15× end-to-end speedup over KVTC. Code will be released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NanoKV-ICLR2027-187D.