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Massive transformer-based models face several challenges, including slow and computationally intensive pre-training and over-parametrization. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a versatile method called GQKVA, which…

In this study, we introduce adaptive KV cache compression, a plug-and-play method that reduces the memory footprint of generative inference for Large Language Models (LLMs). Different from the conventional KV cache that retains key and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Suyu Ge , Yunan Zhang , Liyuan Liu , Minjia Zhang , Jiawei Han , Jianfeng Gao

Large language models (LLMs) rely on key-value (KV) caches for efficient autoregressive decoding; however, cache size grows linearly with context length and model depth, becoming a major bottleneck in long-context inference. Prior KV cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Dmitry Akulov , Mohamed Sana , Antonio De Domenico , Tareq Si Salem , Nicola Piovesan , Fadhel Ayed

As the length of input text increases, the key-value (KV) cache in LLMs imposes prohibitive GPU memory costs and limits long-context inference on resource constrained devices. Existing approaches, such as KV quantization and pruning, reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Tenghui Li , Guoxu Zhou , Xuyang Zhao , Yuning Qiu , Qibin Zhao

The transformer's context window is vital for tasks such as few-shot learning and conditional generation as it preserves previous tokens for active memory. However, as the context lengths increase, the computational costs grow…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Jeffrey Willette , Heejun Lee , Youngwan Lee , Myeongjae Jeon , Sung Ju Hwang

Scaling the context size of large language models (LLMs) enables them to perform various new tasks, e.g., book summarization. However, the memory cost of the Key and Value (KV) cache in attention significantly limits the practical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Zhiyu Guo , Hidetaka Kamigaito , Taro Watanabe

At K=16 tokens (0.4% of a 4K context), every existing KV-cache compression method achieves 0% on credential retrieval. The failure mode is dormant tokens: credentials, API keys, and configuration values that receive near-zero attention but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Abhinaba Basu

Transformers and deep state space models (SSMs) sit at opposite ends of a basic design choice: attention routes each query through a growing key-value (KV) cache by content-based matching at quadratic cost, while deep SSMs compress context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Naoki Kiyohara , Harrison Bo Hua Zhu , Riccardo El Hassanin , Zhuo Sun , Wenlong Chen , Samir Bhatt , Yingzhen Li

Large Language Models struggle with memory demands from the growing Key-Value (KV) cache as context lengths increase. Existing compression methods homogenize head dimensions or rely on attention-guided token pruning, often sacrificing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Xiaoran Liu , Siyang He , Qiqi Wang , Ruixiao Li , Yuerong Song , Zhigeng Liu , Linlin Li , Qun Liu , Zengfeng Huang , Qipeng Guo , Ziwei He , Xipeng Qiu

Key-Value (KV) caching is a common technique to enhance the computational efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs), but its memory overhead grows rapidly with input length. Prior work has shown that not all tokens are equally important…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Yu Fu , Zefan Cai , Abedelkadir Asi , Wayne Xiong , Yue Dong , Wen Xiao

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a unified framework for robotic perception and control, but their ability to scale to real-world, long-horizon tasks is limited by the high computational cost of attention and the large memory…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Wanshun Xu , Long Zhuang , Lianlei Shan

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

Transformers, while powerful, suffer from quadratic computational complexity and the ever-growing Key-Value (KV) cache of the attention mechanism. This paper introduces Trellis, a novel Transformer architecture with bounded memory that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Mahdi Karami , Ali Behrouz , Praneeth Kacham , Vahab Mirrokni

As long-context language modeling becomes increasingly important, the cost of maintaining and attending to large Key/Value (KV) caches grows rapidly, becoming a major bottleneck in both training and inference. While prior works such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu , Ben Lengerich , Ying Nian Wu

Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at recall, the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context. However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during inference by the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Simran Arora , Sabri Eyuboglu , Michael Zhang , Aman Timalsina , Silas Alberti , Dylan Zinsley , James Zou , Atri Rudra , Christopher Ré

Attention-based models have been a key element of many recent breakthroughs in deep learning. Two key components of Attention are the structure of its input (which consists of keys, values and queries) and the computations by which these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Marta Garnelo , Wojciech Marian Czarnecki

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

Multi-headed Attention's (MHA) quadratic compute and linearly growing KV-cache make long-context transformers expensive to train and serve. Prior works such as Grouped Query Attention (GQA) and Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) shrink the cache,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Tomas Figliolia , Nicholas Alonso , Rishi Iyer , Quentin Anthony , Beren Millidge

We propose a simple modification to the conventional attention mechanism applied by Transformers: Instead of quantifying pairwise query-key similarity with scaled dot-products, we quantify it with the logarithms of scaled dot-products of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Franz A. Heinsen

Slim attention shrinks the context memory size by 2x for transformer models with MHA (multi-head attention), which can speed up inference by up to 2x for large context windows. Slim attention is an exact, mathematically identical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Nils Graef , Andrew Wasielewski