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The quadratic computational complexity of the standard attention mechanism constitutes a fundamental bottleneck for large language models in long-context inference. While existing KV cache compression methods alleviate memory pressure, they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Jinyu Guo , Zhihan Zhang , Jiehui Xie , Md. Tamim Iqbal , Dongshen Han , Lik-Hang Lee , Sung-Ho Bae , Jie Zou , Yang Yang , Chaoning Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) face growing challenges in efficient generative inference due to the increasing memory demands of Key-Value (KV) caches, especially for long sequences. Existing eviction methods typically retain KV pairs with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yongqi An , Chang Lu , Kuan Zhu , Tao Yu , Chaoyang Zhao , Hong Wu , Ming Tang , Jinqiao Wang

KV cache pruning has emerged as a promising technique for reducing memory and computation costs in long-context auto-regressive generation. Existing methods for vision-language models (VLMs) typically rely on self-attention scores from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-09 Xiaohuan Pei , Tao Huang , Chang Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs), epitomized by ChatGPT's release in late 2022, have revolutionized various industries with their advanced language comprehension. However, their efficiency is challenged by the Transformer architecture's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Luohe Shi , Hongyi Zhang , Yao Yao , Zuchao Li , Hai Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) require substantial computational resources during generation. While the Key-Value (KV) cache significantly accelerates this process by storing attention intermediates, its memory footprint grows linearly with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Yi Su , Quantong Qiu , Yuechi Zhou , Juntao Li , Qingrong Xia , Ping Li , Xinyu Duan , Zhefeng Wang , Min Zhang

Key-Value (KV) cache has become a bottleneck of LLMs for long-context generation. Despite the numerous efforts in this area, the optimization for the decoding phase is generally ignored. However, we believe such optimization is crucial,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Jialong Wu , Zhenglin Wang , Linhai Zhang , Yilong Lai , Yulan He , Deyu Zhou

KV Cache is commonly used to accelerate LLM inference with long contexts, yet its high memory demand drives the need for cache compression. Existing compression methods, however, are largely heuristic and lack dynamic budget allocation. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Yiqun Shen , Song Yuan , Zhengze Zhang , Xiaoliang Wang , Daxin Jiang , Nguyen Cam-Tu

With the growing demand for long-context LLMs across a wide range of applications, the key-value (KV) cache has become a critical bottleneck for both latency and memory usage. Recently, KV-cache offloading has emerged as a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Andrey Bocharnikov , Ivan Ermakov , Denis Kuznedelev , Vyacheslav Zhdanovskiy , Yegor Yershov

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are plagued by exorbitant inference costs attributable to the profusion of visual tokens within the vision encoder. The redundant visual tokens engenders a substantial computational load and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jiedong Zhuang , Lu Lu , Ming Dai , Rui Hu , Jian Chen , Qiang Liu , Haoji Hu

The key-value (KV) cache is the dominant memory bottleneck during Transformer inference, yet little is known theoretically about how aggressively it can be compressed before multi-step reasoning degrades. We study this through $k$-hop…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xiao Wang

Many computational factors limit broader deployment of large language models. In this paper, we focus on a memory bottleneck imposed by the key-value (KV) cache, a computational shortcut that requires storing previous KV pairs during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Harry Dong , Xinyu Yang , Zhenyu Zhang , Zhangyang Wang , Yuejie Chi , Beidi Chen

Large language models (LLMs) utilize key-value (KV) cache to store historical information during sequence processing. The size of KV cache grows linearly as the length of the sequence extends, which seriously affects memory usage and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Yijun Liu , Yixuan Wang , Yuzhuang Xu , Shiyu Ji , Yang Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

Recently the generative Large Language Model (LLM) has achieved remarkable success in numerous applications. Notably its inference generates output tokens one-by-one, leading to many redundant computations. The widely-used KV-Cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Weizhuo Li , Zhigang Wang , Yu Gu , Ge Yu

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great performance on complex reasoning tasks but often require generating long intermediate thoughts before reaching a final answer. During generation, LLMs rely on a key-value (KV) cache for…

Key-value (KV) caching has become the de-facto to accelerate generation speed for large language models (LLMs) inference. However, the growing cache demand with increasing sequence length has transformed LLM inference to be a memory bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Hao Kang , Qingru Zhang , Souvik Kundu , Geonhwa Jeong , Zaoxing Liu , Tushar Krishna , Tuo Zhao

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

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, necessitate substantial GPU memory and consume significant computational resources. Beyond the memory taken up by model weights, the memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Jincheng Dai , Zhuowei Huang , Haiyun Jiang , Chen Chen , Deng Cai , Wei Bi , Shuming Shi

Multimodal large language models suffer from substantial inference overhead since multimodal KV Cache grows proportionally with the visual input length. Existing multimodal KV Cache compression methods mostly rely on attention score to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yaoxin Yang , Peng Ye , Xudong Tan , Chongjun Tu , Maosen Zhao , Jia Hao , Tao Chen