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Key-Value (KV) cache has become a de facto component of modern Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for inference. While it enhances decoding efficiency in Large Language Models (LLMs), its direct adoption in LVLMs introduces substantial…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Xihao Chen , Yangyang Guo , Roger Zimmermann

When transformer-based language models are deployed for text generation, most of the inference time is spent in the decoding stage, where output tokens are generated sequentially. Reducing the hardware cost of each decoding step is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Sayed Mohammadreza Tayaranian Hosseini , Amir Ardakani , Warren J. Gross

The Key-Value (KV) cache is a crucial component in serving transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs), enabling faster inference by storing previously computed KV vectors. However, its memory consumption scales linearly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Rongzhi Zhang , Kuang Wang , Liyuan Liu , Shuohang Wang , Hao Cheng , Chao Zhang , Yelong Shen

Key-value (KV) caching plays an essential role in accelerating decoding for transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, the amount of memory required to store the KV cache can become prohibitive at long sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 William Brandon , Mayank Mishra , Aniruddha Nrusimha , Rameswar Panda , Jonathan Ragan Kelly

Large language model (LLM) inference demands significant amount of computation and memory, especially in the key attention mechanism. While techniques, such as quantization and acceleration algorithms, like FlashAttention, have improved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Hao Kang , Srikant Bharadwaj , James Hensman , Tushar Krishna , Victor Ruhle , Saravan Rajmohan

The key-value (KV) cache accelerates LLMs decoding by storing KV tensors from previously generated tokens. It reduces redundant computation at the cost of increased memory usage. To mitigate this overhead, existing approaches compress KV…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Hao Wang , Ligong Han , Kai Xu , Akash Srivastava

One of the primary challenges in optimizing large language models (LLMs) for long-context inference lies in the high memory consumption of the Key-Value (KV) cache. Existing approaches, such as quantization, have demonstrated promising…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Wei Tao , Haocheng Lu , Xiaoyang Qu , Bin Zhang , Kai Lu , Jiguang Wan , Jianzong Wang

Key-Value (KV) Caching has become an essential technique for accelerating the inference speed and throughput of generative Large Language Models~(LLMs). However, the memory footprint of the KV cache poses a critical bottleneck in LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 June Yong Yang , Byeongwook Kim , Jeongin Bae , Beomseok Kwon , Gunho Park , Eunho Yang , Se Jung Kwon , Dongsoo Lee

Large language models (LLMs) are typically served from clusters of GPUs/NPUs that consist of large number of devices. Unfortunately, communication between these devices incurs significant overhead, increasing the inference latency and cost…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ahmet Caner Yüzügüler , Jiawei Zhuang , Lukas Cavigelli

Large language models(LLMs) have sparked a new wave of exciting AI applications. Hosting these models at scale requires significant memory resources. One crucial memory bottleneck for the deployment stems from the context window. It is…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks. However, their extensive memory requirements, particularly due to KV cache growth during long-text understanding and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Haoqi Yang , Yao Yao , Zuchao Li , Baoyuan Qi , Guoming Liu , Hai Zhao

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) are increasingly deployed in scenarios demanding ultra-long context reasoning, such as agentic workflows and deep research understanding. However, long-context inference is constrained by the KV cache, a…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Jianlong Lei , Shashikant Ilager

As the length of input text increases, the key-value (KV) cache in LLMs imposes prohibitive GPU memory costs and limits long-context inference on resource constrained devices. Existing approaches, such as KV quantization and pruning, reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Tenghui Li , Guoxu Zhou , Xuyang Zhao , Yuning Qiu , Qibin Zhao

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

Key-Value (KV) cache quantization has become a widely adopted optimization technique for efficient large language models (LLMs) inference by reducing KV cache memory usage and mitigating memory-bound constraints. Recent studies have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Zunhai Su , Kehong Yuan

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

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the critical importance of extending context length, yet the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms poses significant challenges for efficient long-context modeling. KV…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Wanyun Cui , Mingwei Xu

The Key-Value (KV) cache is the primary memory bottleneck in long-context Large Language Models, yet it is typically treated as an opaque numerical tensor. In this work, we propose \textbf{STA-Attention}, a framework that utilizes Top-K…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Qingsen Ma , Dianyun Wang , Jiaming Lyu , Yaoye Wang , Lechen Ning , Sujie Zhu , Zhenbo Xu , Liuyu Xiang , Huining Li , Huijia Wu , Zhaofeng He

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit pronounced memory-bound characteristics during inference due to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) bandwidth constraints. In this paper, we propose an L2 Cache-oriented asynchronous KV Cache prefetching method…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Yanhao Dong , Yubo Miao , Weinan Li , Xiao Zheng , Chao Wang , Jiesheng Wu , Feng Lyu