arXiv AI

UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents

arXiv:2606. 20474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context-heavy agents place unusual pressure on the key-value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

Minima-KV: Retention-Preserving KV Cache Compression with Mixed-Format Paged Attention

Minima-KV introduces a retention‑preserving hierarchy for mixed‑format paged attention that keeps recent and protected anchor pages in FP8 while older pages are compressed into packed TQ3, allowing every live‑request page to remain addressable. The approach uses format‑specific kernels and a globally normalized online‑softmax merge to compute partial attention states, enabling direct heterogeneous decoding without a dense shadow cache. Experiments on Qwen3.6‑27B on a 96‑GB NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU show 3.50× compression over BF16 and 1.75× over FP8, with minimal impact on performance across long‑context benchmarks.

By Sergii Kozyrev (Minima AI, Inc), Davyd Maiboroda (Minima AI, Inc)
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 Machine Learning
5d ago

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