English
Related papers

Related papers: Paged Attention Meets FlexAttention: Unlocking Lon…

200 papers

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive potential in various practical applications. However, long context inference poses a significant challenge due to the enormous memory requirements of the key-value (KV)…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Bo Jiang , Taolue Yang , Youyuan Liu , Chengming Zhang , Xubin He , Sian Jin

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

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

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

Scaling inference for large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by limited GPU memory, especially due to growing key-value (KV) caches required for long-context generation. While existing approaches offload KV caches to CPU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Weishu Deng , Yujie Yang , Peiran Du , Lingfeng Xiang , Zhen Lin , Chen Zhong , Song Jiang , Hui Lu , Jia Rao

Withtherapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), the context length for inference has been continuously increasing, leading to an exponential growth in the demand for Key-Value (KV) caching. This has resulted in a significant…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Yanyu Liu , Jingying Fu , Sixiang Liu , Yitian Zou , You Fu , Jiehan Zhou , Shouhua Zhang

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed for complex tasks that process multiple generation calls in a tree structure with shared prefixes of tokens, including few-shot prompting, multi-step reasoning, speculative decoding,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Jinwei Yao , Kaiqi Chen , Kexun Zhang , Jiaxuan You , Binhang Yuan , Zeke Wang , Tao Lin

As modern LLMs support thousands to millions of tokens, KV caches grow to hundreds of gigabytes, stressing memory capacity and bandwidth. Existing solutions, such as KV cache pruning and offloading, alleviate these but underutilize hardware…

Performance · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mao Lin , Xi Wang , Guilherme Cox , Dong Li , Hyeran Jeon

The Key-Value (KV) cache in generative large language models (LLMs) introduces substantial memory overhead. Existing works mitigate this burden by offloading or compressing the KV cache. However, loading the entire cache incurs significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Dingyu Yao , Bowen Shen , Zheng Lin , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Bin Wang , Weiping Wang

The quadratic computational complexity of standard attention mechanisms presents a severe scalability bottleneck for LLMs in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention mechanisms combining Full Attention (FA) and Sparse Attention (SA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Quantong Qiu , Zhiyi Hong , Yi Yang , Haitian Wang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate substantial potential across a diverse array of domains via request serving. However, as trends continue to push for expanding context sizes, the autoregressive nature of LLMs results in highly…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Bin Lin , Chen Zhang , Tao Peng , Hanyu Zhao , Wencong Xiao , Minmin Sun , Anmin Liu , Zhipeng Zhang , Lanbo Li , Xiafei Qiu , Shen Li , Zhigang Ji , Tao Xie , Yong Li , Wei Lin

As the foundation of large language models (LLMs), self-attention module faces the challenge of quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length. FlashAttention accelerates attention computation and reduces its memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Shimao Chen , Zirui Liu , Zhiying Wu , Ce Zheng , Peizhuang Cong , Zihan Jiang , Yuhan Wu , Lei Su , Tong Yang

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

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 field of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to evolve, the context length in inference is steadily growing. Key-Value Cache (KVCache), the intermediate representations of tokens within LLM inference, has now become the primary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Hailin Zhang , Xiaodong Ji , Yilin Chen , Fangcheng Fu , Xupeng Miao , Xiaonan Nie , Weipeng Chen , Bin Cui

LLM serving is increasingly dominated by decode attention, which is a memory-bound operation due to massive KV cache loading from global memory. Meanwhile, real-world workloads exhibit substantial, hierarchical shared prefixes across…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jinjun Yi , Zhixin Zhao , Yitao Hu , Ke Yan , Weiwei Sun , Hao Wang , Laiping Zhao , Yuhao Zhang , Wenxin Li , Keqiu Li

LLM decoding is bottlenecked for large batches and long contexts by loading the key-value (KV) cache from high-bandwidth memory, which inflates per-token latency, while the sequential nature of decoding limits parallelism. We analyze the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Ted Zadouri , Hubert Strauss , Tri Dao

LLMs encounter significant challenges in resource consumption nowadays, especially with long contexts. Despite extensive efforts dedicate to enhancing inference efficiency, these methods primarily exploit internal sparsity within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Yi Zhao , Zuchao Li , Hai Zhao