APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention

The efficiency of long-video inference remains a critical bottleneck, mainly due to the dense computation in the prefill stage of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). Existing methods either compress visual embeddings or apply sparse attention on a single GPU, yielding limited acceleration or degraded performance and restricting LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos. To overcome these issues, we propose APB-V, a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs. By distributing approximate attention, APB-V reduces computation and increases parallelism, enabling efficient processing of more visual embeddings without compression and thereby improving task performance. System-level optimizations, such as load balancing and fused forward passes, further unleash the potential of APB-V, delivering speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB, without notable performance loss. Code available at https://github.com/thunlp/APB