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Recent large language models (LLMs) are rapidly extending their context windows, yet inference throughput lags due to increasing GPU memory and bandwidth demands. This is because the key-value (KV) cache, an intermediate structure storing…

Sparse attention improves LLM inference efficiency by selecting a subset of key-value entries, but at the cost of potential accuracy degradation. In particular, omitting critical KV entries can induce substantial errors in model outputs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Mohsen Dehghankar , Abolfazl Asudeh

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

Deploying long-context large language models (LLMs) is essential but poses significant computational and memory challenges. Caching all Key and Value (KV) states across all attention heads consumes substantial memory. Existing KV cache…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Guangxuan Xiao , Jiaming Tang , Jingwei Zuo , Junxian Guo , Shang Yang , Haotian Tang , Yao Fu , Song Han

Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable joint processing of text and images. However, incorporating vision data significantly increases the prompt length, resulting in a longer time to first token (TTFT). This bottleneck can be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Tharun Adithya Srikrishnan , Deval Shah , Timothy Hein , Ahmed Hasssan , Stephen Youn , Steven K. Reinhardt

Large language models face significant cost challenges in long-sequence inference. To address this, reusing historical Key-Value (KV) Cache for improved inference efficiency has become a mainstream approach. Recent advances further enhance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Ziyi Cao , Qingyi Si , Jingbin Zhang , Bingquan Liu

In long-context large language model (LLM) inference, the prefill stage dominates computation due to self-attention over the complete input context. Sparse attention significantly reduces self-attention computation by limiting each token's…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Rakshith Jayanth , Viktor Prasanna

Sparsity has long been a central theme in LLM efficiency, but its role in context processing remains unresolved. As LLM workloads shift toward longer contexts and agentic interactions, the compute and memory bottlenecks of attention become…

Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended context lengths face significant computational challenges during the pre-filling phase, primarily due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing methods typically employ dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yu Zhang , Dong Guo , Fang Wu , Guoliang Zhu , Dian Ding , Yiming Zhang

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are commonly derived by extending pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual capabilities. In this work, we investigate how MLLMs process visual inputs by analyzing their attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Jiahui Wang , Zuyan Liu , Yongming Rao , Jiwen Lu

We consider the problem of accurate sparse fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), that is, fine-tuning pretrained LLMs on specialized tasks, while inducing sparsity in their weights. On the accuracy side, we observe that standard…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Eldar Kurtic , Denis Kuznedelev , Elias Frantar , Michael Goin , Dan Alistarh

State-of-the-art sparse attention methods for reducing decoding latency fall into two main categories: approximate top-$k$ (and its extension, top-$p$) and recently introduced sampling-based estimation. However, these approaches are…

Inference-time scaling trades efficiency for increased reasoning accuracy by generating longer or more parallel sequences. However, in Transformer LLMs, generation cost is bottlenecked by the size of the key-value (KV) cache, rather than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Adrian Łańcucki , Konrad Staniszewski , Piotr Nawrot , Edoardo M. Ponti

An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Jintao Zhang , Chendong Xiang , Haofeng Huang , Jia Wei , Haocheng Xi , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

Large language models encounter critical GPU memory capacity constraints during long-context inference, where KV cache memory consumption severely limits decode batch sizes. While existing research has explored offloading KV cache to DRAM,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Qiuyang Zhang , Kai Zhou , Ding Tang , Kai Lu , Cheng Li , Zhenyu Yang , Peng Xu , Jiguang Wan

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a critical bottleneck when handling lengthy inputs: the prohibitive memory footprint of the Key Value (KV) cache. To address this bottleneck, the token pruning paradigm leverages…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yifei Wang , Yueqi Wang , Zhenrui Yue , Huimin Zeng , Yong Wang , Ismini Lourentzou , Zhengzhong Tu , Xiangxiang Chu , Julian McAuley

Large language models (LLMs) have driven significant advancements across diverse NLP tasks, with long-context models gaining prominence for handling extended inputs. However, the expanding key-value (KV) cache size required by Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Lijie Yang , Zhihao Zhang , Zhuofu Chen , Zikun Li , Zhihao Jia

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

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide array of text-centric tasks. However, their `large' scale introduces significant computational and storage challenges, particularly in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Chaoran Zhang , Lixin Zou , Dan Luo , Min Tang , Xiangyang Luo , Zihao Li , Chenliang Li

Decoding throughput improvements from larger inference batches are limited by GPU memory, which is largely consumed by the key-value (KV) cache. Prior training-free KV cache offloading alleviates this by keeping redundant context on the CPU…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yuxiang Huang , Pengjie Wang , Jicheng Han , Weilin Zhao , Zhou Su , Ao Sun , Hongya Lyu , Hengyu Zhao , Yudong Wang , Chaojun Xiao , Xu Han , Zhiyuan Liu