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Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer inference-time memory bottlenecks dominated by the attention Key-Value (KV) cache, which scales with model size and context length. While KV-cache quantization alleviates this cost, bit allocation between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Mohsen Hariri , Alan Luo , Weicong Chen , Shaochen Zhong , Tianyi Zhang , Qifan Wang , Xia Hu , Xiaotian Han , Vipin Chaudhary

Large language models (LLMs) represent a groundbreaking advancement in the domain of natural language processing due to their impressive reasoning abilities. Recently, there has been considerable interest in increasing the context lengths…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Utkarsh Saxena , Gobinda Saha , Sakshi Choudhary , Kaushik Roy

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) require substantial computational resources during generation. While the Key-Value (KV) cache significantly accelerates this process by storing attention intermediates, its memory footprint grows linearly with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Yi Su , Quantong Qiu , Yuechi Zhou , Juntao Li , Qingrong Xia , Ping Li , Xinyu Duan , Zhefeng Wang , Min Zhang

Large Language Models capable of handling extended contexts are in high demand, yet their inference remains challenging due to substantial Key-Value cache size and high memory bandwidth requirements. Previous research has demonstrated that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Junlin Mu , Hantao Huang , Jihang Zhang , Minghui Yu , Tao Wang , Yidong Li

As the context length of current large language models (LLMs) rapidly increases, the memory demand for the Key-Value (KV) cache is becoming a bottleneck for LLM deployment and batch processing. Traditional KV cache compression methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Aomufei Yuan , Zhiming Wang , Ruijie Miao , Dayu Wang , Yuxuan Tian , Zihan Wang , Yebo Peng , Yuhan Wu , Bairen Yi , Xin Liu , Tong Yang

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

Efficient key-value (KV) cache management is crucial for the practical deployment of large language models (LLMs), yet existing compression techniques often incur a trade-off between performance degradation and computational overhead. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Jang-Hyun Kim , Dongyoon Han , Sangdoo Yun

While LLMs are powerful embedding backbones, their application in training-free settings faces two structural challenges: causal attention restricts early tokens from accessing subsequent context, and the next-token prediction objective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Yixuan Tang , Yi Yang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Hanlin Tang , Yang Lin , Jing Lin , Qingsen Han , Shikuan Hong , Yiwu Yao , Gongyi Wang

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 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

KV cache quantization reduces the memory cost of long-context LLM inference, but introduces approximation error that is typically validated only empirically. Existing systems rely on average-case robustness, with no mechanism to detect or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Dean Calver

While Key-Value (KV) cache compression is essential for efficient LLM inference, current evaluations disproportionately focus on sparse retrieval tasks, potentially masking the degradation of High-Density Reasoning where Chain-of-Thought…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xiang Liu , Zhenheng Tang , Hong Chen , Peijie Dong , Zeyu Li , Xiuze Zhou , Bo Li , Xuming Hu , Xiaowen Chu

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

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) 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

Key-Value (KV) cache remains a major bottleneck for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in long-generation tasks. Prior work often applies uniform compression across both prefill and decoding caches, but compressing the prefill cache…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Soumyadeep Jana , Sagar Nishad , Sanasam Ranbir Singh

The linear memory growth of the KV cache poses a significant bottleneck for LLM inference in long-context tasks. Existing static compression methods often fail to preserve globally important information. Although recent dynamic retrieval…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zhiyuan Shi , Qibo Qiu , Feng Xue , Zhonglin Jiang , Li Yu , Jian Jiang , Xiaofei He , Wenxiao Wang

Large language models (LLMs) based on Transformer Decoders have become the preferred choice for conversational generative AI. Despite the overall superiority of the Decoder architecture, the gradually increasing Key-Value (KV) cache during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Luohe Shi , Zuchao Li , Lefei Zhang , Guoming Liu , Baoyuan Qi , Hai Zhao