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The key-value (KV) cache is a major bottleneck in long-context inference, where memory and computation grow with sequence length. Existing KV eviction methods reduce this cost but typically degrade performance relative to full-cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ngoc Bui , Hieu Trung Nguyen , Arman Cohan , Rex Ying

With the growing demand for long-context LLMs across a wide range of applications, the key-value (KV) cache has become a critical bottleneck for both latency and memory usage. Recently, KV-cache offloading has emerged as a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Andrey Bocharnikov , Ivan Ermakov , Denis Kuznedelev , Vyacheslav Zhdanovskiy , Yegor Yershov

A critical approach for efficiently deploying computationally demanding large language models (LLMs) is Key-Value (KV) caching. The KV cache stores key-value states of previously generated tokens, significantly reducing the need for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Akide Liu , Jing Liu , Zizheng Pan , Yefei He , Gholamreza Haffari , Bohan Zhuang

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the critical importance of extending context length, yet the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms poses significant challenges for efficient long-context modeling. KV…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Wanyun Cui , Mingwei Xu

KV-cache compression at small budgets is a crowded design space spanning cache representation, head-wise routing, compression cadence, decoding behavior, and within-budget scoring. We study seven mechanisms across these five families under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Libo Sun , Po-wei Harn , Peixiong He , Xiao Qin

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted to process long-context tasks. However, the large memory overhead of the key-value (KV) cache poses significant challenges in long-context scenarios. Existing training-free KV cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Luning Wang , Shiyao Li , Xuefei Ning , Zhihang Yuan , Shengen Yan , Guohao Dai , Yu Wang

Visual token compression is widely adopted to improve the inference efficiency of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), enabling their deployment in latency-sensitive and resource-constrained scenarios. However, existing work has mainly…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xiaomei Zhang , Zhaoxi Zhang , Leo Yu Zhang , Yanjun Zhang , Guanhong Tao , Shirui Pan

Reasoning large language models exhibit complex reasoning behaviors via extended chain-of-thought generation that are highly fragile to information loss during decoding, creating critical challenges for KV cache compression. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Wenjie Du , Li Jiang , Keda Tao , Xue Liu , Huan Wang

Visual token reduction lowers inference costs caused by extensive image features in large vision-language models (LVLMs). Unlike relevant studies that prune tokens in self-attention-only LVLMs, our work uniquely addresses…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Jewon Lee , Ki-Ung Song , Seungmin Yang , Donguk Lim , Jaeyeon Kim , Wooksu Shin , Bo-Kyeong Kim , Yong Jae Lee , Tae-Ho Kim

As the demand for long-context large language models (LLMs) increases, models with context windows of up to 128K or 1M tokens are becoming increasingly prevalent. However, long-context LLM inference is challenging since the inference speed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Jiaming Tang , Yilong Zhao , Kan Zhu , Guangxuan Xiao , Baris Kasikci , Song Han

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced unified reasoning over text, images, and videos, but their inference is hindered by the rapid growth of key-value (KV) caches. Each visual input expands into thousands of tokens,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Bowen Zeng , Feiyang Ren , Jun Zhang , Xiaoling Gu , Ke Chen , Lidan Shou , Huan Li

The KV cache in self-attention has emerged as a major bottleneck in long-context and large-batch inference for LLMs. Existing approaches often treat sparsity prediction and compression as separate modules, relying on auxiliary index…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xu Yang , Jiapeng Zhang , Dongyang Zhao , Guo Chen , Zhuo Tang

With the development of large language models (LLMs), efficient inference through Key-Value (KV) cache compression has attracted considerable attention, especially for long-context generation. To compress the KV cache, recent methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Qingyue Yang , Jie Wang , Xing Li , Zhihai Wang , Chen Chen , Lei Chen , Xianzhi Yu , Wulong Liu , Jianye Hao , Mingxuan Yuan , Bin Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in long-context tasks such as reasoning, code generation, and multi-turn dialogue. However, inference over extended contexts is bottlenecked by the Key-Value (KV) cache, whose memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Seonghwan Choi , Beomseok Kang , Dongwon Jo , Jae-Joon Kim

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, but their long-context reasoning remains constrained by the excessive memory required for the Key-Value (KV) cache. This makes KV cache compression a critical step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xianglong Yan , Zhiteng Li , Tianao Zhang , Haotong Qin , Linghe Kong , Yulun Zhang , Xiaokang Yang

Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems face a critical bottleneck: redundant transmission of contextual information between agents consumes excessive bandwidth and computational resources. Traditional approaches discard internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Boris Kriuk , Logic Ng

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

Key-value (KV) caching has emerged as a crucial optimization technique for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs). By allowing the attention operation to scale linearly rather than quadratically with the total sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Gopi Krishna Jha , Sameh Gobriel , Liubov Talamanova , Nilesh Jain

Compressing the KV cache is a required step to deploy large language models on edge devices. Current quantization methods compress storage but fail to reduce bandwidth as attention calculation requires dequantizing keys from INT4/INT8 to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Aryan Karmore

Large language models (LLMs) can now handle longer sequences of tokens, enabling complex tasks like book understanding and generating lengthy novels. However, the key-value (KV) cache required for LLMs consumes substantial memory as context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Haojie Duanmu , Zhihang Yuan , Xiuhong Li , Jiangfei Duan , Xingcheng Zhang , Dahua Lin