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Related papers: The Pitfalls of KV Cache Compression

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Efficient KV cache management in LLMs is crucial for long-context tasks like RAG and summarization. Existing KV cache compression methods enforce a fixed pattern, neglecting task-specific characteristics and reducing the retention of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Xiabin Zhou , Wenbin Wang , Minyan Zeng , Jiaxian Guo , Xuebo Liu , Li Shen , Min Zhang , Liang Ding

As context windows in LLMs scale to 100K+ tokens, the key-value (KV) cache becomes the dominant memory bottleneck, with recent methods claiming 80-90% savings and minimal benchmark degradation. We argue these evaluations miss a structural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Samhruth Ananthanarayanan , Ayan Sengupta , Tanmoy Chakraborty

The Key-Value (KV) cache, which stores intermediate attention computations (Key and Value pairs) to avoid redundant calculations, is a fundamental mechanism for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference. However, this efficiency…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Zhifan Luo , Shuo Shao , Su Zhang , Lijing Zhou , Yuke Hu , Chenxu Zhao , Zhihao Liu , Zhan Qin

Key--value (KV) caching enables fast autoregressive decoding but at long contexts becomes a dominant bottleneck in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) capacity and bandwidth. A common mitigation is to compress cached keys and values by projecting…

The increasing size of the Key-Value (KV) cache during the Large Language Models long-context inference is the main obstacle for its balance between the deployment cost and task accuracy. To reduce the KV cache size in such scenarios, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Manlai Liang , JiaMing Zhang , Xiong Li , Jinlong Li

Large language models (LLMs) utilize key-value (KV) cache to store historical information during sequence processing. The size of KV cache grows linearly as the length of the sequence extends, which seriously affects memory usage and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Yijun Liu , Yixuan Wang , Yuzhuang Xu , Shiyu Ji , Yang Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

Long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant memory bottlenecks during inference due to the linear growth of key-value (KV) cache with sequence length. While individual optimization techniques like KV cache quantization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Sai Gokhale , Devleena Das , Rajeev Patwari , Ashish Sirasao , Elliott Delaye

KV cache restoration has emerged as a dominant bottleneck in serving long-context LLM workloads, including multi-turn conversations, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic pipelines. Existing approaches treat restoration as a…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Sean Nian , Jiahao Fang , Qilong Feng , Zhiyu Wu , Fan Lai

KV cache stores key and value states from previous tokens to avoid re-computation, yet it demands substantial storage space, especially for long sequences. Adaptive KV cache compression seeks to discern the saliency of tokens, preserving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Yefei He , Luoming Zhang , Weijia Wu , Jing Liu , Hong Zhou , Bohan Zhuang

Efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires batching multiple requests together to improve throughput. As the batch size, context length, or model size increases, the size of the key and value (KV) cache can quickly become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Tianyi Zhang , Jonah Yi , Zhaozhuo Xu , Anshumali Shrivastava

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced unified reasoning over text, images, and videos, but their inference is hindered by the rapid growth of key-value (KV) caches. Each visual input expands into thousands of tokens,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Bowen Zeng , Feiyang Ren , Jun Zhang , Xiaoling Gu , Ke Chen , Lidan Shou , Huan Li

Self-forcing video generation extends a short-horizon video model to longer rollouts by repeatedly feeding generated content back in as context. This scaling path immediately exposes a systems bottleneck: the key-value (KV) cache grows with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Suraj Ranganath , Vaishak Menon , Anish Patnaik

While Large Language Models (LLMs) can theoretically support extensive context windows, their actual deployment is constrained by the linear growth of Key-Value (KV) cache memory. Prevailing compression strategies mitigate this through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Aryan Sood , Tanvi Sharma , Vansh Agrawal

The Key-Value (KV) cache is central to the efficiency of transformer-based large language models (LLMs), storing previously computed vectors to accelerate inference. Yet, as sequence length and batch size grow, the cache becomes a major…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Damien Lesens , Beheshteh T. Rakhshan , Guillaume Rabusseau

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning problems with explicit chain-of-thought (CoT), but verbose traces incur significant computational costs and memory overhead, and often carry redundant, stylistic artifacts. Latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Anna Kuzina , Maciej Pioro , Paul N. Whatmough , Babak Ehteshami Bejnordi

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely heavily on Key-Value (KV) caching to minimize inference latency. However, standard KV caches are context-dependent: reusing a cached document in a new context requires recomputing KV states to account for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Chuangtao Chen , Grace Li Zhang , Xunzhao Yin , Cheng Zhuo , Bing Li , Ulf Schlichtmann

In Large Language Model (LLM) inference, Key-Value (KV) caches (KV-caches) are essential for reducing time complexity. However, they result in a linear increase in GPU memory as the context length grows. While recent work explores KV-cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Ahmed Burak Gulhan , Krishna Teja Chitty-Venkata , Murali Emani , Mahmut Kandemir , Venkatram Vishwanath

As large language models (LLMs) process increasing context windows, the memory usage of KV cache has become a critical bottleneck during inference. The mainstream KV compression methods, including KV pruning and KV quantization, primarily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Jiebin Zhang , Dawei Zhu , Yifan Song , Wenhao Wu , Chuqiao Kuang , Xiaoguang Li , Lifeng Shang , Qun Liu , Sujian Li

How to efficiently serve LLMs in practice has become exceptionally challenging due to their prohibitive memory and computation requirements. In this study, we investigate optimizing the KV cache, whose memory footprint poses a critical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Akshat Sharma , Hangliang Ding , Jianping Li , Neel Dani , Minjia Zhang

Recently, sharing key-value (KV) cache across layers has been found effective in efficient inference of large language models (LLMs). To systematically investigate different techniques of cross-layer KV sharing, we propose a unified…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 You Wu , Haoyi Wu , Kewei Tu