Related papers: Using Span Queries to Optimize for Cache and Atten…

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…

KV caches, typically used only to speed up autoregressive decoding, encode contextual information that can be reused for downstream tasks at no extra cost. We propose treating the KV cache as a lightweight representation, eliminating the…

The memory and computational demands of Key-Value (KV) cache present significant challenges for deploying long-context language models. Previous approaches attempt to mitigate this issue by selectively dropping tokens, which irreversibly…

The quadratic computational complexity of the attention mechanism in current Large Language Models (LLMs) renders inference with long contexts prohibitively expensive. To address this challenge, various approaches aim to retain critical…

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in streaming applications such as multi-round dialogue, where long interactions are expected, is urgently needed but poses two major challenges. Firstly, during the decoding stage, caching previous…

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on autoregressive, decoder-only Transformers generate text one token at a time, where a token represents a discrete unit of text. As each newly produced token is appended to the partial output sequence,…

Self-attention is an essential component of large language models (LLM) but a significant source of inference latency for long sequences. In multi-tenant LLM serving scenarios, the compute and memory operation cost of self-attention can be…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in processing extensive contexts, with the Key-Value (KV) cache playing a vital role in enhancing their performance. However, the growth of the KV cache in response to increasing…

Modern online large language model (LLM) services, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agent systems, increasingly expose two prominent characteristics: prompt segmentation (e.g., system instructions, retrieved passages, tool…

Given the quadratic complexity of attention, KV cache eviction is vital to accelerate model inference. Current KV cache eviction methods typically rely on instantaneous heuristic metrics, implicitly assuming that score magnitudes are…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is often used with Large Language Models (LLMs) to infuse domain knowledge or user-specific information. In RAG, given a user query, a retriever extracts chunks of relevant text from a knowledge base.…

Long-context models are essential for many applications but face inefficiencies in loading large KV caches during decoding. Prior methods enforce fixed token budgets for sparse attention, assuming a set number of tokens can approximate full…

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…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been extensively used as a de facto paradigm in various large language model (LLM)-driven applications on mobile devices, such as mobile assistants leveraging personal emails or meeting records.…

In Large Language Model (LLM) serving, the KV-cache (KVC) bottleneck causes high tail Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) and Time-Between-Tokens (TBT), impairing user experience, particularly in time-sensitive applications. However, satisfying both…

This study introduces bifurcated attention, a method designed to enhance language model inference in shared-context batch decoding scenarios. Our approach addresses the challenge of redundant memory IO costs, a critical factor contributing…

Long-context LLMs have enabled numerous downstream applications but also introduced significant challenges related to computational and memory efficiency. To address these challenges, optimizations for long-context inference have been…

Inference with Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) on long sequences is both costly and slow due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. We introduce Star Attention, a two-phase block-sparse approximation…

Large language models have revolutionized natural language processing but face significant challenges of high storage and runtime costs, due to the transformer architecture's reliance on self-attention, particularly the large KV cache for…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented success across various applications, but their substantial memory requirements pose significant challenges to current memory system designs, especially during inference. Our work…