English
Related papers

Related papers: Quantize What Counts: More for Keys, Less for Valu…

200 papers

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale in size and context length, the memory requirements of the key value (KV) cache have emerged as a major bottleneck during autoregressive decoding. The KV cache grows with sequence length and embedding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Sourjya Roy , Shrihari Sridharan , Surya Selvam , Anand Raghunathan

Large Language Models struggle with memory demands from the growing Key-Value (KV) cache as context lengths increase. Existing compression methods homogenize head dimensions or rely on attention-guided token pruning, often sacrificing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Xiaoran Liu , Siyang He , Qiqi Wang , Ruixiao Li , Yuerong Song , Zhigeng Liu , Linlin Li , Qun Liu , Zengfeng Huang , Qipeng Guo , Ziwei He , Xipeng Qiu

Key-Value (KV) caching is a common technique to enhance the computational efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs), but its memory overhead grows rapidly with input length. Prior work has shown that not all tokens are equally important…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Yu Fu , Zefan Cai , Abedelkadir Asi , Wayne Xiong , Yue Dong , Wen Xiao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable comprehension abilities but face challenges in GPU memory usage during inference, hindering their scalability for real-time applications like chatbots. To accelerate inference, we store…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Dongjie Yang , XiaoDong Han , Yan Gao , Yao Hu , Shilin Zhang , Hai Zhao

The advent of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. These models predominantly employ an auto-regressive decoding mechanism that utilizes Key-Value (KV) caches to eliminate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Hao Yu , Zelan Yang , Shen Li , Yong Li , Jianxin Wu

The Key-Value (KV) cache introduces substantial memory overhead during large language model (LLM) inference. Although existing vector quantization (VQ) methods reduce KV cache usage and provide flexible representational capacity across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Dingyu Yao , Chenxu Yang , Zhengyang Tong , Zheng Lin , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Weiping Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively researched and used in both academia and industry since the rise in popularity of the Transformer model, which demonstrates excellent performance in AI. However, the computational demands…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Jiedong Lang , Zhehao Guo , Shuyu Huang

The key-value (KV) cache is a primary memory bottleneck in Transformers. We propose Low-Rank Key-Value (LRKV) attention, which reduces KV cache memory by exploiting redundancy across attention heads, while being compute efficient. Each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 James O'Neill , Robert Clancy , Mariia Matskevichus , Fergal Reid

Starting from first principles and a linguistic perspective centered on part-of-speech (POS) and syntactic analysis, this paper explores and derives the underlying essence of the Query-Key-Value (QKV) mechanism within the Transformer…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Zhang Edward

For the efficient inference of Large Language Models (LLMs), the effective compression of key-value (KV) cache is essential. Three main types of KV cache compression techniques, namely sparsity, channel compression, and quantization, have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Hong Yankun , Li Xing , Zhen Hui-Ling , Yu Xianzhi , Liu Wulong , Yuan Mingxuan

Several works have developed eviction policies to remove key-value (KV) pairs from the KV cache for more efficient inference. The focus has been on compressing the KV cache after the input prompt has been processed for faster token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Michael R. Metel , Boxing Chen , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh

Visual autoregressive modeling (VAR) via next-scale prediction has emerged as a scalable image generation paradigm. While Key and Value (KV) caching in large language models (LLMs) has been extensively studied, next-scale prediction…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Boxun Xu , Yu Wang , Zihu Wang , Peng Li

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) represent a groundbreaking advancement in the domain of natural language processing due to their impressive reasoning abilities. Recently, there has been considerable interest in increasing the context lengths…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Utkarsh Saxena , Gobinda Saha , Sakshi Choudhary , Kaushik Roy

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

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

Modern large language models (LLMs) drive interactive AI systems but are bottlenecked by the memory-heavy growth of key-value (KV) caches, which limits real-time throughput under concurrent loads. Existing KV-cache compression methods rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Joseph Kampeas , Emir Haleva

While Key-Value (KV) cache compression is essential for efficient LLM inference, current evaluations disproportionately focus on sparse retrieval tasks, potentially masking the degradation of High-Density Reasoning where Chain-of-Thought…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xiang Liu , Zhenheng Tang , Hong Chen , Peijie Dong , Zeyu Li , Xiuze Zhou , Bo Li , Xuming Hu , Xiaowen Chu

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge or mobile devices offers significant benefits, such as enhanced data privacy and real-time processing capabilities. However, it also faces critical challenges due to the substantial memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Yu Mao , Weilan Wang , Hongchao Du , Nan Guan , Chun Jason Xue

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