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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

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

LLM agents have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving complex tasks through planning, tool use, memory retrieval, and multi-step interaction. However, these agentic workflows often introduce substantial input-side overhead,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haiquan Lu , Zigeng Chen , Gongfan Fang , Xinyin Ma , Xinchao Wang

The efficiency of Large Language Model~(LLM) inference is often constrained by substantial memory bandwidth and capacity demands. Existing techniques, such as pruning, quantization, and mixture of experts/depth, reduce memory capacity…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Rui Xie , Asad Ul Haq , Linsen Ma , Yunhua Fang , Zirak Burzin Engineer , Liu Liu , Tong Zhang

Prefix KV caching has become a key mechanism in LLM serving: it reduces time to first token (TTFT) by avoiding redundant computation across requests that share a prefix (i.e., the system prompt). However, the accumulated KV cache is often…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Yu Zhu , Aditya Dhakal , Yunming Xiao , Dejan Milojicic , Gustavo Alonso

How to efficiently serve Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a pressing issue because of their huge computational cost in their autoregressive generation process. To mitigate computational costs, LLMs often employ the KV Cache technique…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Zheng Wang , Boxiao Jin , Zhongzhi Yu , Minjia Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) utilize key-value (KV) cache to store historical information during sequence processing. The size of KV cache grows linearly as the length of the sequence extends, which seriously affects memory usage and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Yijun Liu , Yixuan Wang , Yuzhuang Xu , Shiyu Ji , Yang Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

Multi-head latent attention (MLA) is designed to optimize KV cache memory through low-rank key-value joint compression. Rather than caching keys and values separately, MLA stores their compressed latent representations, reducing memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Guihong Li , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh , Mingyu Yang , Vikram Appia , Emad Barsoum

Agentic workloads have emerged as a major workload for LLM inference. They differ significantly from chat-only workloads, requiring long-context processing, the ability to handle multimodal inputs, and structured multi-turn interactions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Hanzhang Shen , Haoran Wu , Yiren Zhao , Robert Mullins

The Key-Value (KV) cache is a crucial component in serving transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs), enabling faster inference by storing previously computed KV vectors. However, its memory consumption scales linearly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Rongzhi Zhang , Kuang Wang , Liyuan Liu , Shuohang Wang , Hao Cheng , Chao Zhang , Yelong Shen

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are plagued by exorbitant inference costs attributable to the profusion of visual tokens within the vision encoder. The redundant visual tokens engenders a substantial computational load and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jiedong Zhuang , Lu Lu , Ming Dai , Rui Hu , Jian Chen , Qiang Liu , Haoji Hu

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), despite their remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, necessitate substantial GPU memory and consume significant computational resources. Beyond the memory taken up by model weights, the memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Jincheng Dai , Zhuowei Huang , Haiyun Jiang , Chen Chen , Deng Cai , Wei Bi , Shuming Shi

High throughput serving of large language models (LLMs) requires batching sufficiently many requests at a time. However, existing systems struggle because the key-value cache (KV cache) memory for each request is huge and grows and shrinks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Woosuk Kwon , Zhuohan Li , Siyuan Zhuang , Ying Sheng , Lianmin Zheng , Cody Hao Yu , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Hao Zhang , Ion Stoica

Quantization can accelerate large language model (LLM) inference. Going beyond INT8 quantization, the research community is actively exploring even lower precision, such as INT4. Nonetheless, state-of-the-art INT4 quantization techniques…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Yujun Lin , Haotian Tang , Shang Yang , Zhekai Zhang , Guangxuan Xiao , Chuang Gan , Song Han

We present PolyKV, a system in which multiple concurrent inference agents share a single, asymmetrically compressed KV cache pool. Rather than allocating a separate KV cache per agent -- the standard paradigm -- PolyKV writes a compressed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Ishan Patel , Ishan Joshi

Large Language Model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by memory bandwidth, with frequent access to the key-value (KV) cache dominating data movement. While attention sparsity reduces some memory traffic, the relevance of past…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Yunhua Fang , Rui Xie , Asad Ul Haq , Linsen Ma , Kaoutar El Maghraoui , Naigang Wang , Meng Wang , Liu Liu , Tong Zhang

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

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems increasingly rely on intermediate communication to coordinate complex tasks. While most existing systems communicate through natural language, recent work shows that latent communication,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Sadia Asif , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri , Momin Abbas , Prasanna Sattigeri , Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy

Withtherapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), the context length for inference has been continuously increasing, leading to an exponential growth in the demand for Key-Value (KV) caching. This has resulted in a significant…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Yanyu Liu , Jingying Fu , Sixiang Liu , Yitian Zou , You Fu , Jiehan Zhou , Shouhua Zhang