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Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) face significant efficiency challenges when processing high-resolution inputs. The quadratic complexity in attention and autoregressive generation, as well as the constantly growing key value (KV) cache…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Zhonghua Jiang , Kunxi Li , Yiyun Zhou , Sihao Liu , Zhaode Wang , Chengfei lv , Shengyu Zhang

Huge memory consumption has been a major bottleneck for deploying high-throughput large language models in real-world applications. In addition to the large number of parameters, the key-value (KV) cache for the attention mechanism in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Haoyi Wu , Kewei Tu

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

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 models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Qiuwu Chen , Ying Sun , Shuhai Zhang , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Mingkui Tan

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 (LLMs) based on autoregressive, decoder-only Transformers generate text one token at a time, where a token represents a discrete unit of text. As each newly produced token is appended to the partial output sequence,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Dimitrios Kafetzis , Ramin Khalili , Iordanis Koutsopoulos

Long-context decoding in LLMs is IO-bound: each token re-reads an ever-growing KV cache. Prior accelerations cut bytes via compression, which lowers fidelity, or selection/eviction, which restricts what remains accessible, and both can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Jinghan Yao , Sam Adé Jacobs , Walid Krichene , Masahiro Tanaka , Dhabaleswar K Panda

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across various natural language processing tasks. Serving LLM inference for generating long contents, however, poses a challenge due to the enormous memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Wonbeom Lee , Jungi Lee , Junghwan Seo , Jaewoong Sim

Key-value (KV) cache memory management is the primary bottleneck limiting throughput and cost-efficiency in large-scale GPU inference serving. Current systems suffer from three compounding inefficiencies: (1) the absence of unified KV cache…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Sanjeev Rao Ganjihal

The computational difficulties of large language model (LLM) inference remain a significant obstacle to their widespread deployment. The need for many applications to support long input sequences and process them in large batches typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Luka Ribar , Ivan Chelombiev , Luke Hudlass-Galley , Charlie Blake , Carlo Luschi , Douglas Orr

Large Language Models (LLMs) use key-value (KV) cache to reduce redundant computation in autoregressive generation. However, the KV cache size increases linearly during generation, leading to excessive memory usage, especially for long…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Jian Yuan , Ziwei He , Haoli Bai , Jingwen Leng , Bo Jiang

Attention mechanisms underpin the success of large language models (LLMs), yet their substantial computational and memory overhead poses challenges for optimizing efficiency and performance. A critical bottleneck arises as KV cache and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Luoyang Sun , Cheng Deng , Jiwen Jiang , Xinjian Wu , Haifeng Zhang , Lei Chen , Lionel Ni , Jun Wang

Over the past 7 years, attention has become one of the most important primitives in deep learning. The primary approach to optimize attention is FlashAttention, which fuses the operation together, drastically improving both the runtime and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Juechu Dong , Boyuan Feng , Driss Guessous , Yanbo Liang , Horace He

Attention is a fundamental building block of large language models (LLMs), so there have been many efforts to implement it efficiently. For example, FlashAttention leverages tiling and kernel fusion to optimize attention. Recently, a number…

Memory consumption of the Key-Value (KV) cache represents a major bottleneck for efficient large language model inference. While attention-score-based KV cache pruning shows promise, it faces critical practical limitations: attention scores…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Alessio Devoto , Maximilian Jeblick , Simon Jégou

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

The escalating context length in Large Language Models (LLMs) creates a severe performance bottleneck around the Key-Value (KV) cache, whose memory-bound nature leads to significant GPU under-utilization. This paper introduces Mixture of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Myunghyun Rhee , Sookyung Choi , Euiseok Kim , Joonseop Sim , Youngpyo Joo , Hoshik Kim

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in processing long sequences and complex reasoning tasks, yet efficiently serving these models remains challenging due to the quadratic computational complexity of attention in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Shang Yang , Junxian Guo , Haotian Tang , Qinghao Hu , Guangxuan Xiao , Jiaming Tang , Yujun Lin , Zhijian Liu , Yao Lu , Song Han

As long-context language modeling becomes increasingly important, the cost of maintaining and attending to large Key/Value (KV) caches grows rapidly, becoming a major bottleneck in both training and inference. While prior works such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu , Ben Lengerich , Ying Nian Wu