# Efficient Video Sampling (EVS)

Implementation of [Efficient Video Sampling: Pruning Temporally Redundant Tokens for Faster VLM Inference](https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14624).

## Overview

> NOTE: The current implementation in sglang is cannot work with VLMs that use positional embeddings [Such as Qwen2.5VL]. Further work is warranted.

Video frames often contain redundant information, as consecutive frames may be nearly identical. EVS exploits this in the latent space [=embedding space] by computing similarity between adjacent frame token embeddings and pruning tokens that are highly similar to the previous frames. This reduces the token count while preserving informative content.

Key properties:
- The first frame is always fully retained (provides complete initial context)
- Configurable via `video_pruning_rate` in model config.json (0 = disabled, 0.7 = ~70% reduction; ~30% retained.)


## Performance Characteristics VS. Accuracy - Example

> NOTE: Actual retained accuracy post-EVS may depend on how dynamic the input videos are, how high the pruning rate is, whether or not the model was trained with EVS on or not, etc.
> To learn more, read the paper above. It is incumbent on the user to evaluate as per their use case and benchmarks.

A cursory example of a performance boost due to EVS:

```bash
export SGLANG_VLM_CACHE_SIZE_MB=0
sglang serve --model-path nvidia/Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2-VL-BF16 --trust-remote-code --mem-fraction-static 0.8 --max-mamba-cache-size 128 --chunked-prefill-size 8192
```
Example Request:
```json
{ "model": "nvidia/Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2-VL-BF16", "stream": true, "temperature": 0.0, "max_completion_tokens": 3, "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": [{ "type": "video_url", "video_url": { "url": "file:///tmp/01.mp4" } }]}]}
```

- `1XH100 95GiB`
- `BS=1`
- All 30 videos of `https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmms-lab/Video-MME/blob/main/videos_chunked_01.zip`
- Default [for this model] pruning rate of `--json-model-override-args '{"video_pruning_rate": 0.7}'` [i.e., 30% of tokens are preserved] VS. `--json-model-override-args '{"video_pruning_rate": 0.0}'` [EVS off]

| Scenario\ Metric                	| Online TTFT (Seconds) stderr: ±0.38 	| VideoMME Accuracy       	|
|---------------------------------	|-------------------------------------	|-------------------------	|
| EVS Off [q=0.0]                 	| 11.96 [100%]                          | Between 0.665 and 0.668 	|
| EVS Off [q=0.4]                 	| 09.97 [ 83%]                          |                         	|
| EVS On  [q=0.7] (default value) 	| 08.79 [ 73%]                          |                         	|
| EVS Off [q=0.9]                 	| 08.39 [ 70%]                         	| 0.644                   	|


## Architecture

### Request Flow

1. Prompt Construction (EVSProcessor)
    * Calculates estimated tokens per frame based on pruning rate, so the emitted input_ids tensor's length will by definition match the final sequence length post pruning. This is necessary for 3.
2. Embedding Generation (EVS)
    * Calls original model `get_video_feature()` for full embeddings
    * Retains top-k dissimilar tokens
    * Returns EVSEmbeddingResult in addition to pruned token counts *per frame*
3. Token Redistribution (mm_utils)
    * Adjusts input_ids so each frame's placeholder tokens matches the pruned count from 2.


## Integration Guide

### Step 1: Model [See `NemotronH_Nano_VL_V2`]

Make your model inherit from `EVS` and implement `create_evs_config`:

```python
from sglang.srt.multimodal.evs import EVSConfig, EVS

class MyEVSVideoModel(EVS):
    @staticmethod
    def create_evs_config(config):
        return EVSConfig(
            video_pruning_rate=config.video_pruning_rate
        )

    def __init__(self, config, ...):
        super().__init__(config)  # EVS wraps get_video_feature
        ...

    def get_video_feature(self, items):
        # Your existing implementation
        # Returns: (total_frames, tokens_per_frame, hidden_dim)
        ...
```

### Step 2: Processor [See `NanoNemotronVLImageProcessor`]

Create an `EVSProcessor` as a member of your VLImageProcessor:

```python
from sglang.srt.multimodal.evs import EVSProcessor

class MyProcessor:
    models = [MyEVSVideoModel, MyNonEVSModel] # You may mix evs and non evs models in a processor

    def __init__(hf_config):
        self.evs = EVSProcessor(hf_config, config_to_evs_model={MyEVSVideoModelConfig: MyEVSVideoModel})

    def process_video(self, ...):
        for video in videos:
            tokens_per_frame = self.tokens_per_frame()
        mm_items = create_data_items(
            image=image_feature,
            image_offsets=img_offsets,
            video=video_feature,
            video_offsets=video_offsets,
        )
```

### Step 3: Config [See `NemotronH_Nano_VL_V2_Config`]

Add `video_pruning_rate` to your model config:

```python
class MyModelConfig(PretrainedConfig):
    def __init__(self, ..., video_pruning_rate=0.0, ...):
        self.video_pruning_rate = video_pruning_rate
```

## Files

- `evs_core.py`: Core algorithms (retention mask computation, token redistribution)
- `evs_module.py`: EVS, configs)
- `evs_processor.py`: EVSProcessor