arXiv AI

Interface-Aware KV Cache Quantization for Dense On-Chip NVM in Long-Context LLM Decoding

arXiv AI
6d ago

GAAC: Lossless KV Compression for Bandwidth-Efficient LLM Inference on Personal Devices

The paper introduces GAAC, a lossless key‑value (KV) compression method for large language model inference on personal devices. GAAC encodes BF16 exponents with per‑channel base‑plus‑offset codes, adapts code widths across small groups, and reconstructs KV tiles on the fly to avoid full‑cache decompression. Experiments show 1.4× compression for BF16 KV, speedups of up to 1.27× in decode attention, and a 26% reduction in resident KV memory while boosting throughput on NVIDIA and Apple hardware.

By Yipin Guo, Arun M George, Siddharth Joshi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

The KV Cache Is the New Memory Wall

The paper argues that for large‑context autoregressive language‑model inference, memory bandwidth—specifically the Key‑Value (KV) cache—becomes the limiting resource rather than arithmetic throughput. It analytically derives how arithmetic intensity decays with context length for NVIDIA H100, NVIDIA B200, and AMD MI300X, identifies crossover points where KV traffic overtakes weight traffic, and evaluates representative techniques across five compression domains. The study finds a three‑regime behavior: below the crossover, weight traffic dominates and KV compression offers little benefit; beyond it, KV traffic dominates and compression methods trade quality for bandwidth, with paging and prefix sharing being lossless but capacity‑limited, while quantization and eviction directly reduce bandwidth at the cost of accuracy. whyItMatters":"The work provides a unified analytical framework and a standardized protocol that enable consistent comparison of KV‑compression techniques across hardware and workloads, guiding practitioners in selecting appropriate methods for long‑context inference."

By Tejinder Singh
arXiv AI
Jul 1

KV-RM: Regularizing KV-Cache Movement for Static-Graph LLM Serving

arXiv:2605. 09735v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Static-graph LLM decoders provide predictable launches, fixed tensor shapes, and low submission overhead, but online decoding exposes highly irregular KV-cache behavior: request lengths differ, EOS events arrive asynchronously, and logical histories fragment over time.

By Zhiqing Zhong, Zhijing Ye, Jian Zhang, Weijian Zheng, Bolun Sun, Xiaodong Yu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

RotaryQuant: Fitting 120B MoE Models on Consumer Hardware via Fused Compressed-Space Attention

arXiv:2608. 08081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models with 26--120 billion parameters exceed the memory capacity of consumer devices through three simultaneous pressures: resident weight matrices, key-value (KV) cache state that grows linearly with context, and dozens of expert sublayers that must be paged on demand.

By Anthony. Lui, Mohamed. Elsaied, N. P. Savani
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

D-Quant: Driftable Entropy Coding for KV Cache Quantization

The paper introduces D-Quant, a KV cache quantization framework that addresses the memory bottleneck of large language models by using a drift mechanism to convert entropy-coded representations into fixed-size bitstreams. This approach leverages the non-uniform distribution of KV cache values—after rotation and normalization, they approximate a normal distribution—allowing entropy coding to assign shorter codewords to frequent symbols while maintaining regular memory layouts suitable for parallel attention kernels. D-Quant thus aims to reduce memory footprint and bandwidth usage without sacrificing performance.

By Yi Su, Hong Liu, Guanghua Yu, Jianchen Zhu