arXiv Computation and Language

Cache the Encoder Within:Compact, Reusable Memory across LLM Queries

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

Read What Matters: Query-Adaptive Quantization for KV Caches

The paper introduces ReadKV, a query‑adaptive quantization method for KV caches that stores keys and values in progressive codes, allowing each decoding query to allocate different precision prefixes for keys and values. By optimizing a calibrated distortion objective under fixed budgets, ReadKV achieves near‑optimal allocation and demonstrates that query‑dependent access can outperform any query‑independent reader at the same read budget. Experiments on six base models show that reading only four bits on average from an eight‑bit cache increases perplexity by at most 0.66% while reducing logical reads and retained capacity compared to a 16‑bit cache, and it achieves lower latency than existing codecs on an NVIDIA A10G.

By Siddharth Bhandari, Lucas Gretta, Krishna Balasubramanian, Shiva Kasiviswanathan
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
3d ago

BellowsKV: One Latent for Many Layers, Expanded on Demand

BellowsKV introduces a training‑free approach that maps the hidden states of multiple adjacent layers in a large language model to a single shared latent representation per token, allowing each layer to retrieve its own keys and values via a layer‑specific projection. The method retains the latent at full dimension and offers two compression strategies: BellowsKV‑Quant, which stores the latent at low precision, and BellowsKV‑Evict, which makes a shared eviction decision per block. Experiments on Llama‑3.1‑8B, Mistral‑7B, and Qwen2.5‑7B show that BellowsKV‑Quant preserves about 99% of full‑cache accuracy at 3.6× compression and 97‑98% at 13‑14×, outperforming existing cross‑layer methods that drop to at most 84% accuracy at 16× compression.

By Jiamu Zhang, Hanjie Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 8

FreqDepthKV: Frequency-Guided Depth Sharing for Robust KV Cache Compression in Long-Context LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 06519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context LLM inference is increasingly limited by the memory and bandwidth cost of KV caches, yet aggressive compression can remove the layer-specific evidence needed for retrieval and multi-step reasoning.

By Anna C\'ordoba, Adam Puente Tercero, Nerea Angulo Hijo, Mar Linares Tercero, Julia Barrientos, Ainhoa Miranda, Jes\'us Olivera
arXiv AI
Oct 15

One Distribution, Two Channels: Coverage-Calibrated KV Retention and Compensation

The paper introduces CORE, a method that jointly calibrates coverage and redistributes evicted mass for key–value (KV) cache in long‑context decoding. CORE combines query utility and log‑determinant coverage into a lightweight indexer, using a single calibrated distribution to both retain complementary KV states and parameterize latent‑memory writes. Experiments on three backbones show CORE outperforms the RULER baseline by up to 3.78 points at 90% compression and demonstrates strong decoding efficiency on LongBench and repeated‑eviction tests.

By Shuxin Liu, Qing Liu, Yi Du, Ou Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Flash-dLLM: IO-Aware KV Caching and Parallel Decoding for Fast, Memory-Efficient Diffusion LLMs

Flash-dLLM is a training‑free inference acceleration framework that improves the speed and memory efficiency of Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs). It tackles GPU memory I/O bottlenecks by introducing an I/O‑aware fused KV‑cache kernel and then employs a draft‑and‑verify decoding strategy that uses the dLLM itself as both drafter and verifier. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code‑generation tasks show Flash‑dLLM outperforms existing acceleration methods, achieving up to 11.0× speedups over the Elastic‑Cache baseline.

By Quan Nguyen-Tri, Mukul Ranjan, Zhiqiang Shen