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The increasing size of the Key-Value (KV) cache during the Large Language Models long-context inference is the main obstacle for its balance between the deployment cost and task accuracy. To reduce the KV cache size in such scenarios, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Manlai Liang , JiaMing Zhang , Xiong Li , Jinlong Li

Despite the significant success of large language models (LLMs), their extensive memory requirements pose challenges for deploying them in long-context token generation. The substantial memory footprint of LLM decoders arises from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Amir Zandieh , Insu Han , Vahab Mirrokni , Amin Karbasi

Efficient inference of large language models (LLMs) is hindered by an ever-growing key-value (KV) cache, making KV cache compression a critical research direction. Traditional methods selectively evict less important KV cache entries, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Yuxuan Tian , Zihan Wang , Yebo Peng , Aomufei Yuan , Zhiming Wang , Bairen Yi , Xin Liu , Yong Cui , Tong Yang

Multi-head attention (MHA) has become the cornerstone of modern large language models, enhancing representational capacity through parallel attention heads. However, increasing the number of heads inherently weakens individual head…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Zhanchao Zhou , Xiaodong Chen , Haoxing Chen , Zhenzhong Lan , Jianguo Li

This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Michel Fabrice Serret

Transformer-based LLMs have achieved exceptional performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. However, the standard self-attention mechanism suffers from quadratic time complexity and linearly increased cache size. Sliding window attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Yixing Xu , Shivank Nag , Dong Li , Lu Tian , Emad Barsoum

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on autoregressive, decoder-only Transformers generate text one token at a time, where a token represents a discrete unit of text. As each newly produced token is appended to the partial output sequence,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Dimitrios Kafetzis , Ramin Khalili , Iordanis Koutsopoulos

The memory and computational demands of Key-Value (KV) cache present significant challenges for deploying long-context language models. Previous approaches attempt to mitigate this issue by selectively dropping tokens, which irreversibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Hanlin Tang , Yang Lin , Jing Lin , Qingsen Han , Shikuan Hong , Yiwu Yao , Gongyi Wang

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

Key-value (KV) caching is critical for efficient inference in large language models (LLMs), yet its memory footprint scales linearly with context length, resulting in a severe scalability bottleneck. Existing approaches largely treat KV…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Gradwell Dzikanyanga , Weihao Yang , Hao Huang , Donglei Wu , Shihao Wang , Wen Xia , Sanjeeb K C

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized a wide range of domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, and multi-modal tasks due to their ability to comprehend context and perform logical reasoning. However, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Haoyang Li , Yiming Li , Anxin Tian , Tianhao Tang , Zhanchao Xu , Xuejia Chen , Nicole Hu , Wei Dong , Qing Li , Lei Chen

Withtherapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), the context length for inference has been continuously increasing, leading to an exponential growth in the demand for Key-Value (KV) caching. This has resulted in a significant…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Yanyu Liu , Jingying Fu , Sixiang Liu , Yitian Zou , You Fu , Jiehan Zhou , Shouhua Zhang

Optimizing the Key-Value (KV) cache of the Large Language Model (LLM) has been considered critical to saving the cost of inference. Most of the existing KV-cache compression algorithms attempted to sparsify the sequence of tokens by taking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Zihao Wang , Bin Cui , Shaoduo Gan

Large language models (LLMs) excel at processing long sequences, boosting demand for key-value (KV) caching. While recent efforts to evict KV cache have alleviated the inference burden, they often fail to allocate resources rationally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Ziran Qin , Yuchen Cao , Mingbao Lin , Wen Hu , Shixuan Fan , Ke Cheng , Weiyao Lin , Jianguo Li

As the demand for long-context large language models (LLMs) increases, models with context windows of up to 128K or 1M tokens are becoming increasingly prevalent. However, long-context LLM inference is challenging since the inference speed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Jiaming Tang , Yilong Zhao , Kan Zhu , Guangxuan Xiao , Baris Kasikci , Song Han

Starting from first principles and a linguistic perspective centered on part-of-speech (POS) and syntactic analysis, this paper explores and derives the underlying essence of the Query-Key-Value (QKV) mechanism within the Transformer…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Zhang Edward

Transformer model with multi-head attention requires caching intermediate results for efficient inference in generation tasks. However, cache brings new memory-related costs and prevents leveraging larger batch size for faster speed. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yu Yan , Jiusheng Chen , Weizhen Qi , Nikhil Bhendawade , Yeyun Gong , Nan Duan , Ruofei Zhang

Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is the core computational primitive underlying modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, MHA suffers from a fundamental linear scaling limitation: $H$ attention heads produce exactly $H$ independent attention…

Multimodal Transformers serve as the backbone for state-of-the-art vision-language models, yet their quadratic attention complexity remains a critical barrier to scalability. In this work, we investigate the viability of Linear Attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Armin Gerami , Seyedehanita Madani , Ramani Duraiswami

The development of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized automated code generation. However, their high demand of computation resources has hindered a broader deployment and raised environmental concerns. A common strategy for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Xiangyu Zhang , Yu Zhou , Guang Yang , Harald C. Gall , Taolue Chen