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A critical approach for efficiently deploying computationally demanding large language models (LLMs) is Key-Value (KV) caching. The KV cache stores key-value states of previously generated tokens, significantly reducing the need for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Akide Liu , Jing Liu , Zizheng Pan , Yefei He , Gholamreza Haffari , Bohan Zhuang

The key-value (KV) cache in the tensor version of transformers presents a significant bottleneck during inference. While previous work analyzes the fundamental space complexity barriers in standard attention mechanisms [Haris and Onak,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Yifang Chen , Xiaoyu Li , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Yu Tian

Scaling language models to handle longer input sequences typically necessitates large key-value (KV) caches, resulting in substantial memory overhead during inference. In this paper, we propose Tensor Product Attention (TPA), a novel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Yifan Zhang , Yifeng Liu , Huizhuo Yuan , Zhen Qin , Yang Yuan , Quanquan Gu , Andrew Chi-Chih Yao

Key-Value (KV) caching is a common technique to enhance the computational efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs), but its memory overhead grows rapidly with input length. Prior work has shown that not all tokens are equally important…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Yu Fu , Zefan Cai , Abedelkadir Asi , Wayne Xiong , Yue Dong , Wen Xiao

Key-Value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth increasingly dominate large language model inference cost in long-context and long-generation regimes. Architectures such as multi-head latent attention (MLA) and hybrid sliding-window attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Zhen Cheng , Hao-Bo Yang , Wan-Yi Huang , Jin-Long Li

While the Transformer architecture dominates many fields, its quadratic self-attention complexity hinders its use in large-scale applications. Linear attention offers an efficient alternative, but its direct application often degrades…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Kewei Zhang , Ye Huang , Yufan Deng , Jincheng Yu , Junsong Chen , Huan Ling , Enze Xie , Daquan Zhou

Attention mechanisms underpin the success of large language models (LLMs), yet their substantial computational and memory overhead poses challenges for optimizing efficiency and performance. A critical bottleneck arises as KV cache and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Luoyang Sun , Cheng Deng , Jiwen Jiang , Xinjian Wu , Haifeng Zhang , Lei Chen , Lionel Ni , Jun Wang

Vision-language models (VLMs) show remarkable performance in multimodal tasks. However, excessively long multimodal inputs lead to oversized Key-Value (KV) caches, resulting in significant memory consumption and I/O bottlenecks. Previous KV…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Zunhai Su , Wang Shen , Linge Li , Zhe Chen , Hanyu Wei , Huangqi Yu , Kehong Yuan

Generating long sequences of tokens given a long-context input is a very compute-intensive inference scenario for large language models (LLMs). One prominent inference speed-up approach is to construct a smaller key-value (KV) cache,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Fangyuan Xu , Tanya Goyal , Eunsol Choi

Large language models (LLMs) based on Transformer Decoders have become the preferred choice for conversational generative AI. Despite the overall superiority of the Decoder architecture, the gradually increasing Key-Value (KV) cache during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Luohe Shi , Zuchao Li , Lefei Zhang , Guoming Liu , Baoyuan Qi , Hai Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) use key-value (KV) cache to reduce redundant computation in autoregressive generation. However, the KV cache size increases linearly during generation, leading to excessive memory usage, especially for long…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Jian Yuan , Ziwei He , Haoli Bai , Jingwen Leng , Bo Jiang

The transformer's context window is vital for tasks such as few-shot learning and conditional generation as it preserves previous tokens for active memory. However, as the context lengths increase, the computational costs grow…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Jeffrey Willette , Heejun Lee , Youngwan Lee , Myeongjae Jeon , Sung Ju Hwang

The key-value (KV) cache accelerates LLMs decoding by storing KV tensors from previously generated tokens. It reduces redundant computation at the cost of increased memory usage. To mitigate this overhead, existing approaches compress KV…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Hao Wang , Ligong Han , Kai Xu , Akash Srivastava

Transformers have become central to natural language processing and large language models, but their deployment at scale faces three major challenges. First, the attention mechanism requires massive matrix multiplications and frequent…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Xiaoxuan Yang , Peilin Chen , Tergel Molom-Ochir , Yiran Chen

Key-value (KV) cache memory management is the primary bottleneck limiting throughput and cost-efficiency in large-scale GPU inference serving. Current systems suffer from three compounding inefficiencies: (1) the absence of unified KV cache…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Sanjeev Rao Ganjihal

Efficiently serving large language models (LLMs) requires batching of many requests to reduce the cost per request. Yet, with larger batch sizes and longer context lengths, the key-value (KV) cache, which stores attention keys and values to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Zirui Liu , Jiayi Yuan , Hongye Jin , Shaochen Zhong , Zhaozhuo Xu , Vladimir Braverman , Beidi Chen , Xia Hu

Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), the attention used in DeepSeek-V2/V3, jointly compresses keys and values into a low-rank latent and matches the H100 roofline almost perfectly. Its trained weights, however, expose only one decoding path -…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Fanxu Meng

Massive transformer-based models face several challenges, including slow and computationally intensive pre-training and over-parametrization. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a versatile method called GQKVA, which…

The emergence of LLMs has ignited a fresh surge of breakthroughs in NLP applications, particularly in domains such as question-answering systems and text generation. As the need for longer context grows, a significant bottleneck in model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Shichen Dong , Wen Cheng , Jiayu Qin , Wei Wang

Large language models (LLMs) represent a groundbreaking advancement in the domain of natural language processing due to their impressive reasoning abilities. Recently, there has been considerable interest in increasing the context lengths…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Utkarsh Saxena , Gobinda Saha , Sakshi Choudhary , Kaushik Roy