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The rapid expansion of context window sizes in Large Language Models~(LLMs) has enabled them to tackle increasingly complex tasks involving lengthy documents. However, this progress comes at the cost of a substantial increase in memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Da Ma , Lu Chen , Situo Zhang , Yuxun Miao , Su Zhu , Zhi Chen , Hongshen Xu , Hanqi Li , Shuai Fan , Lei Pan , Kai Yu

The increasing input sequence length in Large Language Models (LLMs) puts significant pressure on key-value (KV) cache storage, making efficient inference challenging. Explicitly distinguishing attention behavior into our self-defined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Mengjie Li , William J. Song

Incorporating external knowledge in large language models (LLMs) enhances their utility across diverse applications, but existing methods have trade-offs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) fetches evidence via similarity search, but key…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Giulio Corallo , Orion Weller , Fabio Petroni , Paolo Papotti

Key-Value (KV) cache quantization has become a widely adopted optimization technique for efficient large language models (LLMs) inference by reducing KV cache memory usage and mitigating memory-bound constraints. Recent studies have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Zunhai Su , Kehong Yuan

Efficient key-value (KV) cache compression is critical for scaling transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) in long sequences and resource-limited settings. Existing methods evict tokens based on their positions or importance scores,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Ziwei He , Jian Yuan , Haoli Bai , Jingwen Leng , Bo Jiang

Large Language models (LLMs) have become a research hotspot. To accelerate the inference of LLMs, storing computed caches in memory has become the standard technique. However, as the inference length increases, growing KV caches might lead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Meizhi Zhong , Xikai Liu , Chen Zhang , Yikun Lei , Yan Gao , Yao Hu , Kehai Chen , Min Zhang

Optimizing the Key-Value (KV) cache of the Large Language Model (LLM) has been considered critical to saving the cost of inference. Most of the existing KV-cache compression algorithms attempted to sparsify the sequence of tokens by taking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Zihao Wang , Bin Cui , Shaoduo Gan

KV cache in autoregressive LLMs eliminates redundant recomputation but has emerged as the dominant memory and bandwidth bottleneck during inference, notably with long contexts and test-time scaling. KV quantization is a key lever for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ji Zhang , Yiwei Li , Shaoxiong Feng , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Jiayi Shi , Yueqi Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on long-context tasks, but are often bottlenecked by memory constraints. Namely, the KV cache, which is used to significantly speed up attention computations, grows…

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

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

The linear growth of key-value (KV) cache memory and quadratic computational in attention mechanisms complexity pose significant bottlenecks for large language models (LLMs) in long-context processing. While existing KV cache optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xin Liu , Xudong Wang , Pei Liu , Guoming Tang

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale in size and context length, the memory requirements of the key value (KV) cache have emerged as a major bottleneck during autoregressive decoding. The KV cache grows with sequence length and embedding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Sourjya Roy , Shrihari Sridharan , Surya Selvam , Anand Raghunathan

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

The linear growth of the Key-Value (KV) cache is a critical bottleneck in long-form LLM inference. Existing KV compression methods mitigate this by evicting tokens based on importance scores. However, we show that their reliance on global…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Junzhe Yang , Xiaoyu Shen

Efficient inference of large language models (LLMs) is hindered by an ever-growing key-value (KV) cache, making KV cache compression a critical research direction. Traditional methods selectively evict less important KV cache entries, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Yuxuan Tian , Zihan Wang , Yebo Peng , Aomufei Yuan , Zhiming Wang , Bairen Yi , Xin Liu , Yong Cui , Tong Yang

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

The key-value (KV) cache is a primary memory bottleneck in Transformers. We propose Low-Rank Key-Value (LRKV) attention, which reduces KV cache memory by exploiting redundancy across attention heads, while being compute efficient. Each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 James O'Neill , Robert Clancy , Mariia Matskevichus , Fergal Reid

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced capabilities by Chain-of-Thought reasoning. However, the extended reasoning sequences introduce significant GPU memory overhead due to increased key-value (KV) cache. Existing KV cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Haoyue Zhang , Hualei Zhang , Xiaosong Ma , Jie Zhang , Song Guo

The growing size of Large Language Models (LLMs) makes efficient inference challenging, primarily due to the memory demands of the autoregressive Key-Value (KV) cache. Existing eviction or compression methods reduce cost but rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Luca Moschella , Laura Manduchi , Ozan Sener