Spend Bits Where Queries Look: KV Cache Vector Quantization with Attention-Preserving Transforms
arXiv:2608. 04074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context LLM decoding reads the key-value (KV) cache at every step.
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.
arXiv:2608. 04074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context LLM decoding reads the key-value (KV) cache at every step.
arXiv:2609.17652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When agentic sessions run to a million tokens with many sessions resident at once, the KV cache and the index that ranks it live in host memory, and th...
Dual-QK introduces paired non‑orthogonal transforms for queries and keys to enable sharp queries and flat keys, improving 2‑bit quantization and dynamic channel pruning of KV caches. The method balances key scales for INT2 quantization while concentrating query energy for pruning, and supports channel‑0 protection and bucket‑relative RoPE for long‑context accuracy. Experiments on four models across five generative benchmarks show that Dual‑QK outperforms OSCAR at 40% query‑channel sparsity, achieving 6.8× KV‑cache compression, an 8.3× reduction in KV read volume, and up to 3.75× decoding throughput over unpruned BF16.
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.
arXiv:2610.02235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context decoding is increasingly constrained by key--value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth. Existing fixed-budget compression methods typically...
arXiv:2610.03027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache becomes a major memory bottleneck in long-context LLM inference, placing substantial pressure on memory capacity and bandwid...
arXiv:2605. 18856v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-context inference is increasingly constrained by the KV cache: resident memory grows with context length, and decoding becomes limited by repeated High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) streaming rather than arithmetic.
arXiv:2606. 24033v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing low-bit KV-cache quantizers often treat each cached key as a flat vector.
arXiv:2607. 01831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context inference is increasingly common in large language model (LLM) serving, driven by retrieval-augmented generation and agentic systems.
arXiv:2609.13285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The KV cache is a primary bottleneck for Transformer decoding: its memory footprint and cache-read traffic grow with sequence length. Grouped-query a...
arXiv:2606. 09079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conventional LLMs keep the full KV cache loaded during decoding, causing a severe GPU memory bottleneck for ultra-long context serving.
arXiv:2609.07966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Key--value (KV) cache compression is an effective way to reduce the memory overhead of large language model (LLM) inference, particularly for long-cont...