QSVD: Efficient Low-rank Approximation for Unified Query-Key-Value Weight Compression in Low-Precision Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are integral to tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering, but their high computational cost, driven by large memory footprints and processing time, limits their scalability and real-time applicability. In this work, we propose leveraging Singular-Value Decomposition (SVD) over the joint query (Q), key (K), and value (V) weight matrices to reduce KV cache size and computational overhead. We in addition introduce an efficient rank allocation strategy that dynamically adjusts the SVD rank based on its impact on VLM accuracy, achieving a significant reduction in both memory usage and computational cost. Finally, we extend this approach by applying quantization to both VLM weights and activations, resulting in a highly efficient VLM. Our method outperforms previous approaches that rely solely on quantization or SVD by achieving more than $10\%$ accuracy improvement while consuming less hardware cost, making it better for real-time deployment on resource-constrained devices. We open source our code at https://github.com/SAI-Lab-NYU/QSVD.