arXiv AI

Tailoring the Quantization Space for 1-Bit KV Cache Compression

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
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Stochastic Sparse Attention for Memory-Bound Inference

arXiv:2605. 01910v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive decoding becomes bandwidth-limited at long contexts, as generating each token requires reading all $n_k$ key and value vectors from KV cache.

By Kyle Lee, Corentin Delacour, Kevin Callahan-Coray, Kyle Jiang, Can Yaras, Samet Oymak, Tathagata Srimani, Kerem Y. Camsari
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Budget-Aware Compression Pipeline for Single-GPU LLM Inference: Methods, Trade-offs, and Coupling Effects

The paper presents a budget‑aware compression pipeline for deploying 70B‑parameter language models on a single NVIDIA GPU. It examines how pruning, quantization, and KV‑cache compression interact, showing that layer‑wise pruning improves weight quantization robustness and that KV‑cache sparsification complements INT8 KV quantization without harming decoding speed. Using these insights, the authors compressed a 70B model to ~33 GB, achieving ~57 tokens/s on 10k‑token prompts on an A40 while maintaining accuracy within 5% on standard benchmarks.

By Hongyu Yu, Yifei Shen