Pingan Gan
Author directory2026
ST-Lite: Training-Free KV Cache Compression with Spatio-Trajectory Guidance for Long-Horizon GUI Agents
Bowen Zhou | Zhou Xu | Wanli Li | Jingyu Xiao | Pingan Gan | Haoqian Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Bowen Zhou | Zhou Xu | Wanli Li | Jingyu Xiao | Pingan Gan | Haoqian Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Training-free KV cache compression is essential for deploying vision-language GUI agents under memory and latency constraints, yet existing methods are designed for generic language workloads and ignore the distinctive structure of GUI interaction traces. We characterize three GUI-specific workload properties — high inter-frame visual redundancy, extremely small UI-element spatial footprints, and near-uniform cross-layer attention sparsity — that cause existing schemes to retain as few as 39% of oracle-important KV pairs at the standard 20% budget. To address this, we propose **ST-Lite**, a training-free compression scheme whose three components each target one property: Trajectory-aware Semantic Gating (TSG) filters redundant historical frames, Component-centric Spatial Saliency (CSS) preserves fine-grained element boundaries, and a flat per-layer budget avoids hierarchical misallocation. Across seven GUI benchmarks and two backbones in the deployment-relevant β ∈ [10%, 40%] window, **ST-Lite** consistently outperforms all existing compression baselines — matching or exceeding Full Cache task accuracy on the primary backbone at the 20% budget — while delivering up to 2.35× decoding speedup at fivefold compression. Code: https://github.com/94wen94/ST-Lite