English
Related papers

Related papers: The Pitfalls of KV Cache Compression

200 papers

Efficient real-world deployments of large language models (LLMs) rely on Key-Value (KV) caching for processing and generating long outputs, reducing the need for repetitive computation. For large contexts, Key-Value caches can take up tens…

As large language models (LLMs) take on complex tasks, their inputs are supplemented with longer contexts that incorporate domain knowledge. Yet using long contexts is challenging, as nothing can be generated until the whole context is…

Traditional KV cache eviction strategies, which discard less critical KV-pairs based on attention scores, often degrade generation quality, causing context loss or hallucinations. Recent efforts shift toward KV merging, merging eviction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Kunxi Li , Yufan Xiong , Zhonghua Jiang , Yiyun Zhou , Zhaode Wang , Chengfei Lv , Shengyu Zhang

This paper introduces ECHO-LLaMA, an efficient LLaMA architecture designed to improve both the training speed and inference throughput of LLaMA architectures while maintaining its learning capacity. ECHO-LLaMA transforms LLaMA models into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Maryam Dialameh , Rezaul Karim , Hossein Rajabzadeh , Omar Mohamed Awad , Hyock Ju Kwon , Boxing Chen , Walid Ahmed , Yang Liu

Language models handle increasingly long contexts for tasks such as book summarization, but this leads to growing memory costs for the key-value (KV) cache. Many prior works have proposed ways of discarding KVs from memory, but their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Adithya Bhaskar , Alexander Wettig , Tianyu Gao , Yihe Dong , Danqi Chen

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

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

Growing context lengths in transformer-based language models have made the key-value (KV) cache a critical inference bottleneck. While many KV cache pruning methods have been proposed, they have not yet been adopted in major inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Simon Jegou , Maximilian Jeblick

Large language models have revolutionized data processing in numerous domains, with their ability to handle extended context reasoning receiving notable recognition. To speed up inference, maintaining a key-value (KV) cache memory is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Zhen Yang , J. N. Han , Kan Wu , Ruobing Xie , An Wang , Xingwu Sun , Zhanhui Kang

Reusing KV cache is essential for high efficiency of Large Language Model (LLM) inference systems. With more LLM users, the KV cache footprint can easily exceed GPU memory capacity, so prior work has proposed to either evict KV cache to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in applications requiring long context lengths, but the key-value (KV) cache often becomes a memory bottleneck on GPUs as context grows. To address this, we propose Commutative Vector…

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as a critical and fast-growing extension of Large Language Models (LLMs) that enable multimodal reasoning through both text and image inputs. Although VLMs enrich the capabilities of language…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yingbing Huang , Tharun Adithya Srikrishnan , Steven K. Reinhardt , Deming Chen

During inference for transformer-based large language models (LLM), prefilling is the computation of the key-value (KV) cache for input tokens in the prompt prior to autoregressive generation. For longer input prompt lengths, prefilling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Siyan Zhao , Daniel Israel , Guy Van den Broeck , Aditya Grover

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

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, but their long-context reasoning remains constrained by the excessive memory required for the Key-Value (KV) cache. This makes KV cache compression a critical step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xianglong Yan , Zhiteng Li , Tianao Zhang , Haotong Qin , Linghe Kong , Yulun Zhang , Xiaokang Yang

Optimizing inference for long-context large language models (LLMs) is increasingly important due to the quadratic compute and linear memory cost of Transformers. Existing approximate inference methods, including key-value (KV) cache…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Kevin Galim , Ethan Ewer , Wonjun Kang , Minjae Lee , Hyung Il Koo , Kangwook Lee

Transformer-based Large Language Models rely critically on the KV cache to efficiently handle extended contexts during the decode phase. Yet, the size of the KV cache grows proportionally with the input length, burdening both memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Payman Behnam , Yaosheng Fu , Ritchie Zhao , Po-An Tsai , Zhiding Yu , Alexey Tumanov

Despite the remarkable progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), the escalating memory footprint of the Key-Value (KV) cache remains a critical bottleneck for efficient inference. While dimensionality reduction offers a promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Liming Lu , Kaixi Qiu , Jiayu Zhou , Jushi Kai , Haoyan Zhang , Huanyu Wang , Jingwen Leng , Ziwei He , Zhouhan Lin

Diffusion-based large language models (Diffusion LLMs) have shown promise for non-autoregressive text generation with parallel decoding capabilities. However, the practical inference speed of open-sourced Diffusion LLMs often lags behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Chengyue Wu , Hao Zhang , Shuchen Xue , Zhijian Liu , Shizhe Diao , Ligeng Zhu , Ping Luo , Song Han , Enze Xie

Recent reasoning large language models (LLMs) excel in complex tasks but encounter significant computational and memory challenges due to long sequence lengths. KV cache compression has emerged as an effective approach to greatly enhance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Mengqi Liao , Lu Wang , Chaoyun Zhang , Zekai Shen , Xiaowei Mao , Si Qin , Qingwei Lin , Saravan Rajmohan , Dongmei Zhang , Huaiyu Wan