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Large Language models (LLMs) have become a research hotspot. To accelerate the inference of LLMs, storing computed caches in memory has become the standard technique. However, as the inference length increases, growing KV caches might lead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Meizhi Zhong , Xikai Liu , Chen Zhang , Yikun Lei , Yan Gao , Yao Hu , Kehai Chen , Min Zhang

When and how can an attention mechanism learn to selectively attend to informative tokens, thereby enabling detection of weak, rare, and sparsely located features? We address these questions theoretically in a sparse-token classification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Nicholas Barnfield , Hugo Cui , Yue M. Lu

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

The computational challenges of Large Language Model (LLM) inference remain a significant barrier to their widespread deployment, especially as prompt lengths continue to increase. Due to the quadratic complexity of the attention…

Efficient long-context inference is critical as large language models (LLMs) adopt context windows of ranging from 128K to 1M tokens. However, the growing key-value (KV) cache and the high computational complexity of attention create…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Guangtao Wang , Shubhangi Upasani , Chen Wu , Darshan Gandhi , Jonathan Li , Changran Hu , Bo Li , Urmish Thakker

Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, yet transformers struggle with efficiency due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Sparse attention methods alleviate this cost but often impose static, predefined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Hanzhi Zhang , Heng Fan , Kewei Sha , Yan Huang , Yunhe Feng

The Key-Value (KV) cache in generative large language models (LLMs) introduces substantial memory overhead. Existing works mitigate this burden by offloading or compressing the KV cache. However, loading the entire cache incurs significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Dingyu Yao , Bowen Shen , Zheng Lin , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Bin Wang , Weiping Wang

Training and serving long-context large language models (LLMs) incurs substantial overhead. To address this, two critical steps are often required: a pretrained LLM typically undergoes a separate stage for context length extension by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Suyu Ge , Xihui Lin , Yunan Zhang , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng

Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Jing Xiong , Chiwun Yang

Transformer-based large models excel in natural language processing and computer vision, but face severe computational inefficiencies due to the self-attention's quadratic complexity with input tokens. Recently, researchers have proposed a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Haojie Ouyang , Jianwei Lv , Lei Ren , Chen Wei , Xiaojie Wang , Fangxiang Feng

Long-context inference in LLMs faces the dual challenges of quadratic attention complexity and prohibitive KV cache memory. While token-level sparse attention offers superior accuracy, its indexing overhead is costly; block-level methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Yuxuan Hu , Jianchao Tan , Jiaqi Zhang , Wen Zan , Pingwei Sun , Yifan Lu , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Jing Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a pivotal research area, yet the attention module remains a critical bottleneck in LLM inference, even with techniques like KVCache to mitigate redundant computations. While various top-$k$…

Large Language Models (LLMs) require significant GPU memory when processing long texts, with the key value (KV) cache consuming up to 70\% of total memory during inference. Although existing compression methods reduce memory by evaluating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Xiang Liu , Zhenheng Tang , Peijie Dong , Zeyu Li , Yue Liu , Bo Li , Xuming Hu , Xiaowen Chu

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

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

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) is often hindered by the extensive memory requirements of the Key-Value (KV) cache, especially as context lengths increase. Existing approaches to reduce the KV cache size involve either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Alessio Devoto , Yu Zhao , Simone Scardapane , Pasquale Minervini

Recently the generative Large Language Model (LLM) has achieved remarkable success in numerous applications. Notably its inference generates output tokens one-by-one, leading to many redundant computations. The widely-used KV-Cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Weizhuo Li , Zhigang Wang , Yu Gu , Ge Yu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized a wide range of domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, and multi-modal tasks due to their ability to comprehend context and perform logical reasoning. However, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Haoyang Li , Yiming Li , Anxin Tian , Tianhao Tang , Zhanchao Xu , Xuejia Chen , Nicole Hu , Wei Dong , Qing Li , Lei Chen

Memory consumption of the Key-Value (KV) cache represents a major bottleneck for efficient large language model inference. While attention-score-based KV cache pruning shows promise, it faces critical practical limitations: attention scores…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Alessio Devoto , Maximilian Jeblick , Simon Jégou

Long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant memory bottlenecks during inference due to the linear growth of key-value (KV) cache with sequence length. While individual optimization techniques like KV cache quantization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Sai Gokhale , Devleena Das , Rajeev Patwari , Ashish Sirasao , Elliott Delaye