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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

Key-Value (KV) Caching has become an essential technique for accelerating the inference speed and throughput of generative Large Language Models~(LLMs). However, the memory footprint of the KV cache poses a critical bottleneck in LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 June Yong Yang , Byeongwook Kim , Jeongin Bae , Beomseok Kwon , Gunho Park , Eunho Yang , Se Jung Kwon , Dongsoo Lee

Context lengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) have exploded in recent years, with 128k-token context becoming a standard and million-token context becoming a reality. Efficiently supporting long-context inference remains challenging as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Isaac Rehg

Generating long sequences of tokens given a long-context input is a very compute-intensive inference scenario for large language models (LLMs). One prominent inference speed-up approach is to construct a smaller key-value (KV) cache,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Fangyuan Xu , Tanya Goyal , Eunsol Choi

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances large language models (LLMs) by enabling step-by-step problem-solving, yet its extension to Long-CoT introduces substantial computational overhead due to increased token length. Existing compression…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Yibo Wang , Haotian Luo , Huanjin Yao , Tiansheng Huang , Haiying He , Rui Liu , Naiqiang Tan , Jiaxing Huang , Xiaochun Cao , Dacheng Tao , Li Shen

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities but face substantial serving costs due to their high memory demands, with the key-value (KV) cache being a primary bottleneck. State-of-the-art KV cache compression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Yanqi Zhang , Yuwei Hu , Runyuan Zhao , John C. S. Lui , Haibo Chen

Key-Value cache (\texttt{KV} \texttt{cache}) compression has emerged as a promising technique to optimize Large Language Model (LLM) serving. It primarily decreases the memory consumption of \texttt{KV} \texttt{cache} to reduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Wei Gao , Xinyu Zhou , Peng Sun , Tianwei Zhang , Yonggang Wen

Recent large vision-language models (LVLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in processing extended multi-modal sequences, yet the resulting key-value (KV) cache expansion creates a critical memory bottleneck that fundamentally limits…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Xuyang Liu , Xiyan Gui , Yuchao Zhang , Linfeng Zhang

KV cache eviction has emerged as an effective solution to alleviate resource constraints faced by LLMs in long-context scenarios. However, existing token-level eviction methods often overlook two critical aspects: (1) their irreversible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Yi Zhao , Yajuan Peng , Cam-Tu Nguyen , Zuchao Li , Xiaoliang Wang , Hai Zhao , Xiaoming Fu

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) is often hindered by the extensive memory requirements of the Key-Value (KV) cache, especially as context lengths increase. Existing approaches to reduce the KV cache size involve either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Alessio Devoto , Yu Zhao , Simone Scardapane , Pasquale Minervini

Reasoning language models such as DeepSeek-R1 produce long chain-of-thought traces during inference time which make them costly to deploy at scale. We show that using compression techniques such as neural network pruning produces greater…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ryan Lucas , Kayhan Behdin , Zhipeng Wang , Qingquan Song , Shao Tang , Rahul Mazumder

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

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

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

Compression methods, including quantization, distillation, and pruning, improve the computational efficiency of large reasoning models (LRMs). However, existing studies either fail to sufficiently compare all three compression methods on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Nan Zhang , Eugene Kwek , Yusen Zhang , Ngoc-Hieu Nguyen , Prasenjit Mitra , Rui Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) require significant GPU memory when processing long texts, with the key value (KV) cache consuming up to 70\% of total memory during inference. Although existing compression methods reduce memory by evaluating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Xiang Liu , Zhenheng Tang , Peijie Dong , Zeyu Li , Yue Liu , Bo Li , Xuming Hu , Xiaowen Chu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) excel on complex problems but face a critical barrier to efficiency: reinforcement learning (RL) training requires long rollouts for outcome-based rewards, where autoregressive decoding dominates time and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Zeliang Zhang , Xiaodong Liu , Hao Cheng , Hao Sun , Chenliang Xu , Jianfeng Gao

The key-value (KV) cache is the dominant memory bottleneck during Transformer inference, yet little is known theoretically about how aggressively it can be compressed before multi-step reasoning degrades. We study this through $k$-hop…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xiao Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in scenarios demanding ultra-long context reasoning, such as agentic workflows and deep research understanding. However, long-context inference is constrained by the KV cache, a…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Jianlong Lei , Shashikant Ilager

Memory and computation remain core bottlenecks in long-horizon LLM inference due to the quadratic cost of self-attention and the ever-growing key-value (KV) cache. Existing strategies for memory-bounded inference, such as quantization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ngoc Bui , Shubham Sharma , Simran Lamba , Saumitra Mishra , Rex Ying