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The KV cache used in large language models has linearly growing time complexity, so LLMs face memory blow-up and reduced decoding efficiency when they process long contexts. Current KV Cache eviction has become an important research…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Wei Luo , Yi Huang , Songchen Ma , Huanyu Qu , Jiang Cai , Mingkun Xu

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly trained to support very large context windows. We present Compactor, a training-free, query-agnostic KV compression strategy that uses approximate leverage scores to determine token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Vivek Chari , Benjamin Van Durme

The impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) come at the cost of substantial computational resources during deployment. While KV Cache can significantly reduce recomputation during inference, it also introduces additional…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Yi Su , Yuechi Zhou , Quantong Qiu , Juntao Li , Qingrong Xia , Ping Li , Xinyu Duan , Zhefeng Wang , Min Zhang

KV-cache memory is a major bottleneck in real-world LLM serving, where systems must simultaneously support latency-sensitive small-batch requests and high-throughput concurrent workloads. Although many KV-cache compression methods improve…

Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) face significant efficiency challenges when processing high-resolution inputs. The quadratic complexity in attention and autoregressive generation, as well as the constantly growing key value (KV) cache…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Zhonghua Jiang , Kunxi Li , Yiyun Zhou , Sihao Liu , Zhaode Wang , Chengfei lv , Shengyu Zhang

Sub-token routing provides a finer compression axis for transformer efficiency than the coarse units used in most prior work, such as tokens, pages, heads, or layers. In this paper, we study routing within a token representation itself in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Wei Jiang , Wei Wang

KV cache memory is the dominant bottleneck for long-context LLM inference. Existing compression methods each act on a single axis of the four-dimensional KV tensor -- token eviction (sequence), quantization (precision), low-rank projection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Libo Sun , Peixiong He , Po-Wei Harn , Xiao Qin

With context windows of millions of tokens, Long-Context Language Models (LCLMs) can encode entire document collections, offering a strong alternative to conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, it remains unclear whether…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Francesco Maria Molfese , Momchil Hardalov , Rexhina Blloshmi , Bill Byrne , Adrià de Gispert

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for unlocking the advanced reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), encompassing frameworks like RLHF and RLAIF. Regardless of the specific optimization algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Rui Zhu , Weiheng Bai , Qiushi Wu , Yang Ren , Haixu Tang , Yuchu Liu

The expanding long-context capabilities of large language models are constrained by a significant memory bottleneck: the key-value (KV) cache required for autoregressive generation. This bottleneck is substantial; for instance, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yuxuan Zhu , David H. Yang , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri , Keerthiram Murugesan , Tejaswini Pedapati , Pin-Yu Chen

For the efficient inference of Large Language Models (LLMs), the effective compression of key-value (KV) cache is essential. Three main types of KV cache compression techniques, namely sparsity, channel compression, and quantization, have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Hong Yankun , Li Xing , Zhen Hui-Ling , Yu Xianzhi , Liu Wulong , Yuan Mingxuan

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zeyu Xing , Xing Li , Hui-Ling Zhen , Mingxuan Yuan , Sinno Jialin Pan

How to efficiently serve LLMs in practice has become exceptionally challenging due to their prohibitive memory and computation requirements. In this study, we investigate optimizing the KV cache, whose memory footprint poses a critical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Akshat Sharma , Hangliang Ding , Jianping Li , Neel Dani , Minjia Zhang

Interacting with humans through multi-turn conversations is a fundamental feature of large language models (LLMs). However, existing LLM serving engines executing multi-turn conversations are inefficient due to the need to repeatedly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Bin Gao , Zhuomin He , Puru Sharma , Qingxuan Kang , Djordje Jevdjic , Junbo Deng , Xingkun Yang , Zhou Yu , Pengfei Zuo

Long-context language modeling is increasingly constrained by the Key-Value (KV) cache, whose memory and decode-time access costs scale linearly with the prefix length. This bottleneck has motivated a range of context-compression methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yoav Gelberg , Yam Eitan , Michael Bronstein , Yarin Gal , Haggai Maron

Transformers have emerged as the underpinning architecture for Large Language Models (LLMs). In generative language models, the inference process involves two primary phases: prompt processing and token generation. Token generation, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Muhammad Adnan , Akhil Arunkumar , Gaurav Jain , Prashant J. Nair , Ilya Soloveychik , Purushotham Kamath

Efficiently serving large language models (LLMs) requires batching of many requests to reduce the cost per request. Yet, with larger batch sizes and longer context lengths, the key-value (KV) cache, which stores attention keys and values to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Zirui Liu , Jiayi Yuan , Hongye Jin , Shaochen Zhong , Zhaozhuo Xu , Vladimir Braverman , Beidi Chen , Xia Hu

The increasing context window size in large language models (LLMs) has improved their ability to handle complex, long-text tasks. However, as the conversation rounds continue, it is required to store a large amount of KV cache in GPU…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Yaohua Tang , Zhicheng Hu , Kun Cheng , Fan Mo , Qiheng Lv , Hua Wang , Zhi Chen

In large language models performing long-form reasoning, the KV cache grows rapidly with decode length, creating bottlenecks in memory and inference stability. Existing reasoning-oriented KV compression has mostly followed an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Buseong Kim , Heejun Gwon

Key--value (KV) caching enables fast autoregressive decoding but at long contexts becomes a dominant bottleneck in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) capacity and bandwidth. A common mitigation is to compress cached keys and values by projecting…