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Related papers: The Pitfalls of KV Cache Compression

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Memory-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability for complex and long-horizon embodied planning. By keeping track of past experiences and environmental states, memory enables LLMs to maintain a global…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Zebin Yang , Tong Xie , Baotong Lu , Shaoshan Liu , Bo Yu , Meng Li

Distributed LLM serving is costly and often underutilizes hardware accelerators due to three key challenges: bubbles in pipeline-parallel deployments caused by the bimodal latency of prompt and token processing, GPU memory overprovisioning,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Foteini Strati , Sara Mcallister , Amar Phanishayee , Jakub Tarnawski , Ana Klimovic

Multimodal Large Language Models face severe challenges in computational efficiency and memory consumption due to the substantial expansion of the visual KV cache when processing long visual contexts. Existing KV cache compression methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Sihao Liu , YuFan Xiong , Zhonghua Jiang , Zhaode Wang , chengfei lv Shengyu Zhang

For the efficient inference of Large Language Models (LLMs), the effective compression of key-value (KV) cache is essential. Three main types of KV cache compression techniques, namely sparsity, channel compression, and quantization, have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Hong Yankun , Li Xing , Zhen Hui-Ling , Yu Xianzhi , Liu Wulong , Yuan Mingxuan

We demonstrate that unstructured sparsity significantly improves KV cache compression for LLMs, enabling sparsity levels up to 70% without compromising accuracy or requiring fine-tuning. We conduct a systematic exploration of pruning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Donghyeon Joo , Helya Hosseini , Ramyad Hadidi , Bahar Asgari

Large language models (LLMs) are typically served from clusters of GPUs/NPUs that consist of large number of devices. Unfortunately, communication between these devices incurs significant overhead, increasing the inference latency and cost…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ahmet Caner Yüzügüler , Jiawei Zhuang , Lukas Cavigelli

KV cache compression methods have mainly relied on scalar quantization techniques to reduce the memory requirements during decoding. In this work, we apply residual vector quantization, which has been widely used for high fidelity audio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Ankur Kumar

To reduce memory consumption during LLM inference, prior works have proposed numerous methods that focus on KV cache pruning based on various criteria. While these techniques often accomplish lossless memory reduction on many datasets, they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Xuanfan Ni , Liyan Xu , Chenyang Lyu , Longyue Wang , Mo Yu , Lemao Liu , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Piji Li

Unlike offline processing, streaming video vision-language models face two fundamental constraints: causality and accumulation. Causality prevents access to future frames that offline methods exploit, while accumulation causes tokens to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xueyi Chen , Keda Tao , Kele Shao , Huan Wang

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

Long-context language modeling is increasingly constrained by the Key-Value (KV) cache, whose memory and decode-time access costs scale linearly with the prefix length. This bottleneck has motivated a range of context-compression methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yoav Gelberg , Yam Eitan , Michael Bronstein , Yarin Gal , Haggai Maron

Long-context inference in Large Language Models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the linear growth of Key-Value (KV) cache memory. Existing KV cache compression paradigms are fundamentally limited by heuristics: heuristic budgeting relies on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Enshuai Zhou , Yifan Hao , Chao Wang , Rui Zhang , Di Huang , Jiaming Guo , Xing Hu , Zidong Du , Qi Guo , Yunji Chen

In this study, we investigate whether attention-based information flow inside large language models (LLMs) is aggregated through noticeable patterns for long context processing. Our observations reveal that LLMs aggregate information…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Zefan Cai , Yichi Zhang , Bofei Gao , Yuliang Liu , Yucheng Li , Tianyu Liu , Keming Lu , Wayne Xiong , Yue Dong , Junjie Hu , Wen Xiao

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across reasoning, generation, and decision-making tasks, yet deploying them on mobile, embedded, and edge devices remains particularly challenging. On-device LLM inference is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Sayed Pedram Haeri Boroujeni , Niloufar Mehrabi , Patrick Woods , Gabriel Hillesheim , Abolfazl Razi

The increasing complexity of AI tasks has shifted the paradigm from monolithic models toward multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems. However, these collaborative architectures introduce a critical bottleneck: redundant prefill…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Yingsheng Geng , Yuchong Gao , Weihong Wu , Guyue Liu , Jiang Liu

Processing long-context inputs with large language models presents a significant challenge due to the enormous memory requirements of the Key-Value (KV) cache during inference. Existing KV cache compression methods exhibit noticeable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Dongquan Yang , Yifan Yang , Xiaotian Yu , Xianbiao Qi , Rong Xiao

KV cache offloading enables long-context LLM inference by storing caches in CPU DRAM, but PCIe bandwidth limitations create severe bottlenecks. In this paper, we develops an analytical framework that derives $\kappa_{\text{crit}}$, the…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-01-29 William Meng , Benjamin Lee , Hong Wang

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly advanced the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), but this progress is accompanied by substantial memory and latency overhead from the extensive Key-Value (KV) cache. Although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Tao Zhang , Ziqian Zeng , Hao Peng , Huiping Zhuang , Cen Chen

Remote KV cache reuse fetches KV cache for identical contexts from remote storage, avoiding recomputation, accelerating LLM inference. While it excels in high-speed networks, its performance degrades significantly in bandwidth-limited…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Liang Mi , Weijun Wang , Jinghan Chen , Ting Cao , Haipeng Dai , Yunxin Liu