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KV cache quantization can improve Large Language Models (LLMs) inference throughput and latency in long contexts and large batch-size scenarios while preserving LLMs effectiveness. However, current methods have three unsolved issues:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Xing Li , Zeyu Xing , Yiming Li , Linping Qu , Hui-Ling Zhen , Wulong Liu , Yiwu Yao , Sinno Jialin Pan , Mingxuan Yuan

Efficient real-world deployments of large language models (LLMs) rely on Key-Value (KV) caching for processing and generating long outputs, reducing the need for repetitive computation. For large contexts, Key-Value caches can take up tens…

Video large language models (VideoLLMs) have demonstrated the capability to process longer video inputs and enable complex reasoning and analysis. However, due to the thousands of visual tokens from the video frames, the key-value (KV)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Keda Tao , Haoxuan You , Yang Sui , Can Qin , Huan Wang

Long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant memory bottlenecks during inference due to the linear growth of key-value (KV) cache with sequence length. While individual optimization techniques like KV cache quantization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Sai Gokhale , Devleena Das , Rajeev Patwari , Ashish Sirasao , Elliott Delaye

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse applications. However, their computational overhead during deployment remains a critical bottleneck. While Key-Value (KV) caching effectively…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Insu Han , Zeliang Zhang , Zhiyuan Wang , Yifan Zhu , Susan Liang , Jiani Liu , Haiting Lin , Mingjie Zhao , Chenliang Xu , Kun Wan , Wentian Zhao

Large Language models (LLMs) have become a research hotspot. To accelerate the inference of LLMs, storing computed caches in memory has become the standard technique. However, as the inference length increases, growing KV caches might lead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Meizhi Zhong , Xikai Liu , Chen Zhang , Yikun Lei , Yan Gao , Yao Hu , Kehai Chen , Min Zhang

Long-context reasoning is a critical capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling applications such as long-document understanding, summarization, and code generation. However, efficient autoregressive inference relies on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Zahra Dehghanighobadi , Asja Fischer

The key-value (KV) cache is a foundational optimization in Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), eliminating redundant recomputation of past token representations during autoregressive generation. However, its memory footprint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yichun Xu , Navjot K. Khaira , Tejinder Singh

Large Language Model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by memory bandwidth, with frequent access to the key-value (KV) cache dominating data movement. While attention sparsity reduces some memory traffic, the relevance of past…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Yunhua Fang , Rui Xie , Asad Ul Haq , Linsen Ma , Kaoutar El Maghraoui , Naigang Wang , Meng Wang , Liu Liu , Tong Zhang

KV cache quantization reduces the memory cost of long-context LLM inference, but introduces approximation error that is typically validated only empirically. Existing systems rely on average-case robustness, with no mechanism to detect or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Dean Calver

Key-value (KV) caching has emerged as a crucial optimization technique for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs). By allowing the attention operation to scale linearly rather than quadratically with the total sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Gopi Krishna Jha , Sameh Gobriel , Liubov Talamanova , Nilesh Jain

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

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

Efficient inference with Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly relies on Key-Value (KV) caches to store previously computed key and value vectors at each layer. These caches are essential to minimize redundant computation during…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Oteo Mamo , Olga Kogiou , Hyunjin Yi , Weikuan Yu

Recently, sharing key-value (KV) cache across layers has been found effective in efficient inference of large language models (LLMs). To systematically investigate different techniques of cross-layer KV sharing, we propose a unified…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 You Wu , Haoyi Wu , Kewei Tu

In Large Language Model (LLM) inference, Key-Value (KV) caches (KV-caches) are essential for reducing time complexity. However, they result in a linear increase in GPU memory as the context length grows. While recent work explores KV-cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Ahmed Burak Gulhan , Krishna Teja Chitty-Venkata , Murali Emani , Mahmut Kandemir , Venkatram Vishwanath

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

Model quantization has become a crucial technique to address the issues of large memory consumption and long inference times associated with LLMs. Mixed-precision quantization, which distinguishes between important and unimportant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Yifan Tan , Haoze Wang , Chao Yan , Yangdong Deng

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

LLMs are seeing growing use for applications which require large context windows, and with these large context windows KV cache activations surface as the dominant contributor to memory consumption during inference. Quantization is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Coleman Hooper , Sehoon Kim , Hiva Mohammadzadeh , Michael W. Mahoney , Yakun Sophia Shao , Kurt Keutzer , Amir Gholami