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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

Recent reasoning large language models (LLMs) excel in complex tasks but encounter significant computational and memory challenges due to long sequence lengths. KV cache compression has emerged as an effective approach to greatly enhance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Mengqi Liao , Lu Wang , Chaoyun Zhang , Zekai Shen , Xiaowei Mao , Si Qin , Qingwei Lin , Saravan Rajmohan , Dongmei Zhang , Huaiyu Wan

Efficient KV cache management in LLMs is crucial for long-context tasks like RAG and summarization. Existing KV cache compression methods enforce a fixed pattern, neglecting task-specific characteristics and reducing the retention of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Xiabin Zhou , Wenbin Wang , Minyan Zeng , Jiaxian Guo , Xuebo Liu , Li Shen , Min Zhang , Liang Ding

Autoregressive language models rely on a Key-Value (KV) Cache, which avoids re-computing past hidden states during generation, making it faster. As model sizes and context lengths grow, the KV Cache becomes a significant memory bottleneck,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Nathan Godey , Alessio Devoto , Yu Zhao , Simone Scardapane , Pasquale Minervini , Éric de la Clergerie , Benoît Sagot

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) is often hindered by the extensive memory requirements of the Key-Value (KV) cache, especially as context lengths increase. Existing approaches to reduce the KV cache size involve either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Alessio Devoto , Yu Zhao , Simone Scardapane , Pasquale Minervini

Processing long-context inputs with large language models presents a significant challenge due to the enormous memory requirements of the Key-Value (KV) cache during inference. Existing KV cache compression methods exhibit noticeable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Dongquan Yang , Yifan Yang , Xiaotian Yu , Xianbiao Qi , Rong Xiao

Large language models face significant computational and memory challenges when processing long contexts. During inference, efficient management of the key-value (KV) cache, which stores intermediate activations for autoregressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yuxuan Zhu , Ali Falahati , David H. Yang , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri

Long-context inference in Large Language Models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the linear growth of Key-Value (KV) cache memory. Existing KV cache compression paradigms are fundamentally limited by heuristics: heuristic budgeting relies on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Enshuai Zhou , Yifan Hao , Chao Wang , Rui Zhang , Di Huang , Jiaming Guo , Xing Hu , Zidong Du , Qi Guo , Yunji Chen

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

Efficient key-value (KV) cache compression is critical for scaling transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) in long sequences and resource-limited settings. Existing methods evict tokens based on their positions or importance scores,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Ziwei He , Jian Yuan , Haoli Bai , Jingwen Leng , Bo Jiang

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

KV caches, typically used only to speed up autoregressive decoding, encode contextual information that can be reused for downstream tasks at no extra cost. We propose treating the KV cache as a lightweight representation, eliminating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zeyu Xing , Xing Li , Hui-Ling Zhen , Mingxuan Yuan , Sinno Jialin Pan

Huge memory consumption has been a major bottleneck for deploying high-throughput large language models in real-world applications. In addition to the large number of parameters, the key-value (KV) cache for the attention mechanism in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Haoyi Wu , Kewei Tu

Key-Value (KV) cache plays a crucial role in accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs) by storing intermediate attention states and avoiding redundant computation during autoregressive generation. However, its memory footprint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Yuzhen Mao , Qitong Wang , Martin Ester , Ke Li

While large language models (LLMs) excel at handling long-context sequences, they require substantial prefill computation and key-value (KV) cache, which can heavily burden computational efficiency and memory usage in both prefill and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Dongwon Jo , Jiwon Song , Yulhwa Kim , Jae-Joon Kim

With the advancements in long-context inference capabilities of large language models (LLMs), the KV cache has become one of the foundational components. However, its substantial GPU memory consumption makes KV cache compression a key…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Youhui Zuo , Sibo Wei , Chen Zhang , Zhuorui Liu , Wenpeng Lu , Dawei Song

Recent reasoning models such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown strong performance on complex tasks including mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, this performance gain comes with substantially longer output sequences,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yi Su , Zhenxu Tian , Dan Qiao , Yuechi Zhou , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Large language models have revolutionized natural language processing but face significant challenges of high storage and runtime costs, due to the transformer architecture's reliance on self-attention, particularly the large KV cache for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yuan Feng , Junlin Lv , Haoyu Guo , Yukun Cao , S Kevin Zhou , Xike Xie

Transformer-based Large Language Models rely critically on the KV cache to efficiently handle extended contexts during the decode phase. Yet, the size of the KV cache grows proportionally with the input length, burdening both memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Payman Behnam , Yaosheng Fu , Ritchie Zhao , Po-An Tsai , Zhiding Yu , Alexey Tumanov

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in processing extensive contexts, with the Key-Value (KV) cache playing a vital role in enhancing their performance. However, the growth of the KV cache in response to increasing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yuhong Li , Yingbing Huang , Bowen Yang , Bharat Venkitesh , Acyr Locatelli , Hanchen Ye , Tianle Cai , Patrick Lewis , Deming Chen