STaR-KV: Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Re-weighting for KV Cache Compression in GUI Vision-Language Models
About
Vision-language-model-based graphical user interface (GUI) agents have shown broad automation capabilities, yet deployment is bottlenecked by a key-value (KV) cache that grows linearly with interaction steps. For instance, UI-TARS-1.5-7B consumes 76 GB of GPU memory on merely five screenshots, approaching the capacity of mainstream 80 GB accelerators. Existing KV compression methods share two structural assumptions: aggregating visual-token importance into a single shared saliency map, and applying a fixed top-B cutoff to the fused score distribution. Pilot measurements refute both: spatial specialization lives at the attention-subspace level and migrates across layers, while the score distribution drifts in shape along a trajectory. We propose STaR-KV (Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Re-weighting), a training-free KV cache compression framework that calibrates token importance along three axes: (i) subspace-aware scoring driven by online spatial mutual information; (ii) a temporal stability discount that suppresses redundant cache entries from persistently attended subspaces; and (iii) an entropy-derived temperature that adaptively reshapes the score distribution. Across four GUI benchmarks, STaR-KV achieves the strongest average accuracy among state-of-the-art KV compression methods (e.g., GUIKV, SnapKV) at matched budgets, with no compression-stage FLOPs overhead (-0.07%) and cutting peak GPU memory by nearly 40% at a 20% KV-cache budget. Code is available at https://github.com/kawhiiiileo/STaR-KV.