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FibQuant: Universal Vector Quantization for Random-Access KV-Cache Compression

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-13 v1 Information Theory math.IT Machine Learning

Abstract

Long-context inference is increasingly a memory-traffic problem. The culprit is the key--value (KV) cache: it grows with context length, batch size, layers, and heads, and it is read at every decoding step. Rotation-based scalar codecs meet this systems constraint by storing a norm, applying a shared random rotation, and quantizing one coordinate at a time. They are universal and random-access, but they discard the geometry created by the normalization step. After a Haar rotation, a block of kk consecutive coordinates is not a product source; it is a spherical-Beta source on the unit ball. We introduce \textsc{FibQuant}, a universal fixed-rate vector quantizer that keeps the same normalize--rotate--store interface while replacing scalar tables by a shared radial--angular codebook matched to this canonical source. The codebook combines Beta-quantile radii, Fibonacci\,/\,Roberts--Kronecker quasi-uniform directions, and multi-restart Lloyd--Max refinement. We prove that the resulting vector code strictly improves on its scalar product specialization at matched rate, with a high-rate gain that separates into a cell-shaping factor and a density-matching factor. The same construction gives a dense rate axis, including fractional-bit and sub-one-bit operating points, without calibration or variable-length addresses. On GPT-2 small KV caches, \textsc{FibQuant} traces a memory--fidelity frontier from 5×5\times compression at 0.990.99 attention cosine similarity to 34×34\times at 0.950.95. End-to-end on TinyLlama-1.1B, it is within 0.100.10 perplexity of fp16 at 4×4\times compression and has 3.6×3.6\times lower perplexity than scalar \textsc{TurboQuant} at b=2b = 2 (8×8\times compression), where scalar random-access quantization begins to fail.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.11478,
  title  = {FibQuant: Universal Vector Quantization for Random-Access KV-Cache Compression},
  author = {Namyoon Lee and Yongjune Kim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.11478},
  year   = {2026}
}

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15 pages