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Recently, sharing key-value (KV) cache across layers has been found effective in efficient inference of large language models (LLMs). To systematically investigate different techniques of cross-layer KV sharing, we propose a unified…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 You Wu , Haoyi Wu , Kewei Tu

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across diverse natural language processing tasks. However, as the model size and the input sequence's length increase, the linearly increasing key-value (KV) cache…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Qingyun Jin , Xiaohui Song , Feng Zhou , Zengchang Qin

Converting pretrained attention modules such as grouped-query attention (GQA) into multi-head latent attention (MLA) can improve expressivity without increasing KV-cache cost, making it attractive for efficient inference. However, many…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in long-context tasks such as reasoning, code generation, and multi-turn dialogue. However, inference over extended contexts is bottlenecked by the Key-Value (KV) cache, whose memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Seonghwan Choi , Beomseok Kang , Dongwon Jo , Jae-Joon Kim

Standard Transformer attention uses identical dimensionality for queries, keys, and values, yet these components serve different roles: queries and keys produce scalar attention weights (selection), while values carry rich representations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hengshuai Yao , Xing Chen , Ahmed Murtadha , Guan Wang

Reducing the key-value (KV) cache size is a crucial step toward enabling efficient inference in large language models (LLMs), especially under latency and memory constraints. While Multi-Head Attention (MHA) offers strong representational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Zhengge Cai , Haowen Hou

The size of the key-value (KV) cache plays a critical role in determining both the maximum context length and the number of concurrent requests supported during inference in modern language models. The KV cache size grows proportionally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Shashank Rajput , Ying Sheng , Sean Owen , Vitaliy Chiley

Multi-head latent attention (MLA) is designed to optimize KV cache memory through low-rank key-value joint compression. Rather than caching keys and values separately, MLA stores their compressed latent representations, reducing memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Guihong Li , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh , Mingyu Yang , Vikram Appia , Emad Barsoum

Large Language Models (LLMs) face limitations due to the high demand on GPU memory and computational resources when handling long contexts. While sparsify the Key-Value (KV) cache of transformer model is a typical strategy to alleviate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Yumeng Wang , Zhenyang Xiao

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted long-context processing. However, the increasing key-value (KV) cache size poses critical challenges to memory and execution efficiency. Most KV cache compression…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Xiaolin Lin , Jingcun Wang , Olga Kondrateva , Yiyu Shi , Bing Li , Grace Li Zhang

In Large Language Model (LLM) inference, Key-Value (KV) caches (KV-caches) are essential for reducing time complexity. However, they result in a linear increase in GPU memory as the context length grows. While recent work explores KV-cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Ahmed Burak Gulhan , Krishna Teja Chitty-Venkata , Murali Emani , Mahmut Kandemir , Venkatram Vishwanath

Multi-head attention layers, as used in the Transformer neural sequence model, are a powerful alternative to RNNs for moving information across and between sequences. While training these layers is generally fast and simple, due to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Noam Shazeer

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer inference-time memory bottlenecks dominated by the attention Key-Value (KV) cache, which scales with model size and context length. While KV-cache quantization alleviates this cost, bit allocation between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Mohsen Hariri , Alan Luo , Weicong Chen , Shaochen Zhong , Tianyi Zhang , Qifan Wang , Xia Hu , Xiaotian Han , Vipin Chaudhary

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized deep learning through its Self-Attention mechanism, which effectively captures contextual information. However, the memory footprint of Self-Attention presents significant challenges for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Zohaib Khan , Muhammad Khaquan , Omer Tafveez , Burhanuddin Samiwala , Agha Ali Raza

Efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires batching multiple requests together to improve throughput. As the batch size, context length, or model size increases, the size of the key and value (KV) cache can quickly become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Tianyi Zhang , Jonah Yi , Zhaozhuo Xu , Anshumali Shrivastava

Transformers have emerged as the underpinning architecture for Large Language Models (LLMs). In generative language models, the inference process involves two primary phases: prompt processing and token generation. Token generation, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Muhammad Adnan , Akhil Arunkumar , Gaurav Jain , Prashant J. Nair , Ilya Soloveychik , Purushotham Kamath

The key-value (KV) cache in transformer models is a critical component for efficient decoding or inference, yet its memory demands scale poorly with sequence length, posing a major challenge for scalable deployment of large language models.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Vinay Joshi , Pratik Prabhanjan Brahma , Zicheng Liu , Emad Barsoum

Large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly bottlenecked by the Key-Value (KV) cache, yet the fine-grained structure of attention-head activations remains poorly understood. We show that pretrained Transformers exhibit a pervasive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Khalid Shaikh , Asmit Kumar Singh , Rebecca Christopher Dsouza , Shikhar Shiromani

Efficient real-world deployments of large language models (LLMs) rely on Key-Value (KV) caching for processing and generating long outputs, reducing the need for repetitive computation. For large contexts, Key-Value caches can take up tens…

Key-value (KV) caching has emerged as a crucial optimization technique for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs). By allowing the attention operation to scale linearly rather than quadratically with the total sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Gopi Krishna Jha , Sameh Gobriel , Liubov Talamanova , Nilesh Jain