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Quantizing the key-value (KV) cache is a promising strategy for improving the inference efficiency of large language models (LLMs). However, aggressive quantization to very low precision (e.g., 2 bits) introduces significant errors in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Utkarsh Saxena , Kaushik Roy

Transformers have emerged as the underpinning architecture for Large Language Models (LLMs). In generative language models, the inference process involves two primary phases: prompt processing and token generation. Token generation, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Muhammad Adnan , Akhil Arunkumar , Gaurav Jain , Prashant J. Nair , Ilya Soloveychik , Purushotham Kamath

Current hierarchical attention methods, such as NSA and InfLLMv2, select the top-k relevant key-value (KV) blocks based on coarse attention scores and subsequently apply fine-grained softmax attention on the selected tokens. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yuxiang Huang , Nuno M. T. Gonçalves , Federico Alvetreti , Lei Li , Xu Han , Edoardo M. Ponti , André F. T. Martins , Marcos V. Treviso

Efficient inference of large language models (LLMs) is hindered by an ever-growing key-value (KV) cache, making KV cache compression a critical research direction. Traditional methods selectively evict less important KV cache entries, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Yuxuan Tian , Zihan Wang , Yebo Peng , Aomufei Yuan , Zhiming Wang , Bairen Yi , Xin Liu , Yong Cui , Tong Yang

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to support context windows exceeding one million tokens, the linear growth of Key-Value (KV) cache imposes severe memory capacity and bandwidth bottlenecks, constraining the efficiency of long-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Zhirui Chen , Peiyang Liu , Ling Shao

Cost of serving large language models (LLM) is high, but the expensive and scarce GPUs are poorly efficient when generating tokens sequentially, unless the batch of sequences is enlarged. However, the batch size is limited by some…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jiaao He , Jidong Zhai

The quadratic complexity of attention remains the central bottleneck in long-context inference for large language models. Prior acceleration methods either sparsify the attention map with structured patterns or permanently evict tokens at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Dongwon Jo , Beomseok Kang , Jiwon Song , Jae-Joon Kim

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

The linear growth of key-value (KV) cache memory and quadratic computational in attention mechanisms complexity pose significant bottlenecks for large language models (LLMs) in long-context processing. While existing KV cache optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xin Liu , Xudong Wang , Pei Liu , Guoming Tang

Large language models face significant computational and memory challenges when processing long contexts. During inference, efficient management of the key-value (KV) cache, which stores intermediate activations for autoregressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yuxuan Zhu , Ali Falahati , David H. Yang , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri

The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) and has been foundational in developing large language models (LLMs) such as LLaMA and OPT, which have come to dominate a broad range of NLP tasks.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Youpeng Zhao , Di Wu , Jun Wang

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism and the substantial memory footprint of the Key-Value (KV) cache present severe computational and memory challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs) processing long contexts. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Dongfang Li , Zixuan Liu , Gang Lin , Baotian Hu , Min Zhang

As large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) grow in scale and application, attention mechanisms have become a central computational bottleneck due to their high memory and time complexity. While many efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zhengyu Tian , Anantha Padmanaban Krishna Kumar , Hemant Krishnakumar , Reza Rawassizadeh

Long-context LLM inference is bottlenecked by the quadratic attention complexity and linear KV cache growth. Prior approaches mitigate this via post-hoc selection or eviction but overlook the root inefficiency: indiscriminate writing to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Yen-Chieh Huang , Pi-Cheng Hsiu , Rui Fang , Ming-Syan Chen

The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hanno Ackermann , Hong Cai , Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

Large language models (LLMs) rely on key-value cache (KV cache) to accelerate decoding by reducing redundant computations. However, the KV cache memory usage grows substantially with longer text sequences, posing challenges for efficient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Yixuan Wang , Shiyu Ji , Yijun Liu , Yuzhuang Xu , Yang Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

Multimodal large language models suffer from substantial inference overhead since multimodal KV Cache grows proportionally with the visual input length. Existing multimodal KV Cache compression methods mostly rely on attention score to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yaoxin Yang , Peng Ye , Xudong Tan , Chongjun Tu , Maosen Zhao , Jia Hao , Tao Chen

We present QUOKA: Query-oriented KV selection for efficient attention, a training-free and hardware agnostic sparse attention algorithm for accelerating transformer inference under chunked prefill. While many queries focus on a smaller…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dalton Jones , Junyoung Park , Matthew Morse , Mingu Lee , Chris Lott , Harper Langston

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

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide array of text-centric tasks. However, their `large' scale introduces significant computational and storage challenges, particularly in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Chaoran Zhang , Lixin Zou , Dan Luo , Min Tang , Xiangyang Luo , Zihao Li , Chenliang Li