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The Key-Value (KV) cache is central to the efficiency of transformer-based large language models (LLMs), storing previously computed vectors to accelerate inference. Yet, as sequence length and batch size grow, the cache becomes a major…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Damien Lesens , Beheshteh T. Rakhshan , Guillaume Rabusseau

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

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller draft model to propose multiple tokens that are verified by a larger target model in parallel. While prior work demonstrates substantial speedups…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Linghao Kong , Megan Flynn , Michael Peng , Nir Shavit , Mark Kurtz , Alexandre Marques

Long-context LLM inference is bottlenecked by the memory and bandwidth cost of reading large KV caches during decoding. KV compression reduces this cost by keeping only part of the cache, but task accuracy alone does not identify why a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ruijie Zhang , Haozhe Liang , Da Chang , Li Hu , Fanqi Kong , Huaxiao Yin , Yu Li

The growing complexity of LLM usage today, e.g., multi-round conversation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), makes contextual states (i.e., KV cache) reusable across user requests. Given the capacity constraints of GPU memory, only a…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Shiwei Gao , Youmin Chen , Jiwu Shu

As large language models (LLMs) take on complex tasks, their inputs are supplemented with longer contexts that incorporate domain knowledge. Yet using long contexts is challenging, as nothing can be generated until the whole context is…

LLMs are seeing growing use for applications which require large context windows, and with these large context windows KV cache activations surface as the dominant contributor to memory consumption during inference. Quantization is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Coleman Hooper , Sehoon Kim , Hiva Mohammadzadeh , Michael W. Mahoney , Yakun Sophia Shao , Kurt Keutzer , Amir Gholami

Key-value~(KV) caching is an important technique to accelerate the inference of large language models~(LLMs), but incurs significant memory overhead. To compress the size of KV cache, existing methods often compromise precision or require…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Peiyu Liu , Ze-Feng Gao , Wayne Xin Zhao , Yipeng Ma , Tao Wang , Ji-Rong Wen

Long-context reasoning is a critical capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling applications such as long-document understanding, summarization, and code generation. However, efficient autoregressive inference relies on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Zahra Dehghanighobadi , Asja Fischer

Speculative decoding accelerates inference for Large Language Models by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are verified in parallel by a larger target model. Prior work shows that the draft model often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ofir Ben Shoham

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by letting a small drafter propose multiple tokens which a large target model verifies once per speculation step. As vocabularies scale past 10e5 tokens,verification cost in the target model is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Jinbin Zhang , Nasib Ullah , Erik Schultheis , Rohit Babbar

Long-context inference in large language models is increasingly bottlenecked by the memory and compute cost of the KV-Cache. Low-rank factorization compresses KV projections by writing $W \approx A * B$, where A produces latent KV states…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jihao Xin , Tian Lyu , David Keyes , Hatem Ltaief , Marco Canini

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reasoning and planning when trained on chainof-thought (CoT) data, where the step-by-step thought process is explicitly outlined by text tokens. However, this results in lengthy inputs where many words…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 DiJia Su , Hanlin Zhu , Yingchen Xu , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Qinqing Zheng

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to propose candidate tokens that a larger target model verifies. A critical hyperparameter in this process is the speculation length…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Shikhar Shukla

Speculative decoding, which combines a draft model with a target model, has emerged as an effective approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference. However, existing methods often face a trade-off between the acceptance rate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Danying Ge , Jianhua Gao , Qizhi Jiang , Yifei Feng , Weixing Ji

While chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables LLMs to solve challenging reasoning tasks, the linear growth of the KV cache leads to substantial memory and inference overhead. Existing approaches such as context compression and multi-token…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xinyu Liu , Xin Liu , Bo Jin , Runsong Zhao , Pengcheng Huang , Junhao Ruan , Bei Li , Chunyang Xiao , Chenglong Wang , Tong Xiao , Jingbo Zhu

The growth of long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly increases memory and bandwidth pressure during autoregressive decoding due to the expanding Key-Value (KV) cache. While accuracy-preserving KV-cache quantization (e.g.,…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Dayou Du , Shijie Cao , Jianyi Cheng , Luo Mai , Ting Cao , Mao Yang

While explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) equips Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities, it requires models to verbalize every intermediate step in text tokens, constraining the model thoughts to the discrete vocabulary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Weihao Liu , Dehai Min , Lu Cheng

KV caching is a fundamental technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference by reusing key-value (KV) pairs from previous queries, but its effectiveness under limited memory is highly sensitive to the eviction policy. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Fangzhou Wu , Sandeep Silwal , Qiuyi , Zhang

Speculative decoding and quantization effectively accelerate memory-bound inference of large language models. Speculative decoding mitigates the memory bandwidth bottleneck by verifying multiple tokens within a single forward pass, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yudi Zhang , Weilin Zhao , Xu Han , Tiejun Zhao , Wang Xu , Hailong Cao , Conghui Zhu