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Inference with transformer-based language models begins with a prompt processing step. In this step, the model generates the first output token and stores the KV cache needed for future generation steps. This prompt processing step can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Maxwell Horton , Qingqing Cao , Chenfan Sun , Yanzi Jin , Sachin Mehta , Mohammad Rastegari , Moin Nabi

We study the problem of efficient generative inference for Transformer models, in one of its most challenging settings: large deep models, with tight latency targets and long sequence lengths. Better understanding of the engineering…

While Transformer self-attention offers strong parallelism, the Key-Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length and becomes a bottleneck for inference efficiency. Multi-head latent attention was recently developed to compress the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Keqi Deng , Philip C. Woodland

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in complex multi-agent applications that rely on external function calls. This workload creates severe performance challenges for the KV Cache: spatial contention leads to the eviction…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Zhuohang Bian , Feiyang Wu , Zhuoran Li , Teng Ma , Youwei Zhuo

Inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) is computationally demanding. To reduce the cost of auto-regressive decoding, Key-Value (KV) cache is used to store intermediate activations, which significantly lowers the computational overhead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Chaoyi Jiang , Lei Gao , Hossein Entezari Zarch , Murali Annavaram

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across a versatile set of tasks. A key challenge in accelerating VLMs is storing and accessing the large Key-Value (KV) cache that encodes long visual contexts, such as…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Dezhan Tu , Danylo Vashchilenko , Yuzhe Lu , Panpan Xu

Transformer-based large models excel in natural language processing and computer vision, but face severe computational inefficiencies due to the self-attention's quadratic complexity with input tokens. Recently, researchers have proposed a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Haojie Ouyang , Jianwei Lv , Lei Ren , Chen Wei , Xiaojie Wang , Fangxiang Feng

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their recent impressive accomplishments, are notably cost-prohibitive to deploy, particularly for applications involving long-content generation, such as dialogue systems and story writing. Often, a…

Generating texts with a large language model (LLM) consumes massive amounts of memory. Apart from the already-large model parameters, the key/value (KV) cache that holds information about previous tokens in a sequence can grow to be even…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yunho Jin , Chun-Feng Wu , David Brooks , Gu-Yeon Wei

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant deployment challenges due to their substantial memory requirements and the computational demands of auto-regressive text generation process. This paper addresses these challenges by focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Yuxuan Yue , Zhihang Yuan , Haojie Duanmu , Sifan Zhou , Jianlong Wu , Liqiang Nie

As context windows in LLMs scale to 100K+ tokens, the key-value (KV) cache becomes the dominant memory bottleneck, with recent methods claiming 80-90% savings and minimal benchmark degradation. We argue these evaluations miss a structural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Samhruth Ananthanarayanan , Ayan Sengupta , Tanmoy Chakraborty

We challenge the prevailing assumption that LLMs must rely fully on sub-word tokens for high-quality text generation. To this end, we propose the "Generative Pretrained Thoughtformer" (GPTHF), a hierarchical transformer language model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-17 David Gu , Peter Belcak , Roger Wattenhofer

One of the most striking findings in modern research on large language models (LLMs) is that scaling up compute during training leads to better results. However, less attention has been given to the benefits of scaling compute during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Sean Welleck , Amanda Bertsch , Matthew Finlayson , Hailey Schoelkopf , Alex Xie , Graham Neubig , Ilia Kulikov , Zaid Harchaoui

Memory consumption of the Key-Value (KV) cache represents a major bottleneck for efficient large language model inference. While attention-score-based KV cache pruning shows promise, it faces critical practical limitations: attention scores…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Alessio Devoto , Maximilian Jeblick , Simon Jégou

The efficiency of large vision-language models (LVLMs) is constrained by the computational bottleneck of the attention mechanism during the prefill phase and the memory bottleneck of fetching the key-value (KV) cache in the decoding phase,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Yefei He , Feng Chen , Jing Liu , Wenqi Shao , Hong Zhou , Kaipeng Zhang , Bohan Zhuang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in scenarios demanding ultra-long context reasoning, such as agentic workflows and deep research understanding. However, long-context inference is constrained by the KV cache, a…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Jianlong Lei , Shashikant Ilager

The advent of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. These models predominantly employ an auto-regressive decoding mechanism that utilizes Key-Value (KV) caches to eliminate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Hao Yu , Zelan Yang , Shen Li , Yong Li , Jianxin Wu

As large language models (LLMs) process increasing context windows, the memory usage of KV cache has become a critical bottleneck during inference. The mainstream KV compression methods, including KV pruning and KV quantization, primarily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Jiebin Zhang , Dawei Zhu , Yifan Song , Wenhao Wu , Chuqiao Kuang , Xiaoguang Li , Lifeng Shang , Qun Liu , Sujian Li

Visual autoregressive modeling (VAR) via next-scale prediction has emerged as a scalable image generation paradigm. While Key and Value (KV) caching in large language models (LLMs) has been extensively studied, next-scale prediction…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Boxun Xu , Yu Wang , Zihu Wang , Peng Li

Large language models (LLMs) are essential in natural language processing but often struggle with inference speed and computational efficiency, limiting real-time deployment. The key-value (KV) cache mechanism reduces computational overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Junqi Zhao , Zhijin Fang , Shu Li , Shaohui Yang , Shichao He