arXiv Machine Learning

VarRate: Training-Free Variable-Rate KV Cache Compression for Long-Context LLMs

arXiv:2607. 15498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache is the main memory bottleneck in long-context large language model (LLM) inference.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

NestedKV: Nested Memory Routing for Long-Context KV Cache Compression

NestedKV is a training‑free key‑only KV cache compression technique for long‑context language models that uses global, block‑level, and sliding‑window key anchors to score tokens via multi‑time‑scale cosine anomaly. It combines these rankings with a head‑adaptive outer learner and surprise‑gated token routing, requiring no model modification or additional training. Experiments on Qwen3 and Llama‑3.2 across benchmarks such as RULER, LongBench, and MMLU‑Pro show that NestedKV outperforms existing methods when the retained cache is small, achieving up to 19‑point gains on RULER and LongBench at a 75% retention rate.

By Hong Chen, Xiang Liu, Yubo Gao, Yuxuan Fan, Bo Wang, Yuanlin Chu, Yuanguo Lin, Xuming Hu
arXiv AI
Jun 24

CompressKV: Semantic-Retrieval-Guided KV-Cache Compression for Resource-Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 24467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint and decoding cost of key-value (KV) caches, limiting sustainable deployment on resource-constrained hardware.

By Xiaolin Lin, Jingcun Wang, Olga Kondrateva, Yiyu Shi, Bing Li, Grace Li Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 7

IndexMem: Learned KV-Cache Eviction with Latent Memory for Long-Context LLM Inference

arXiv:2605. 25475v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to operate over long contexts, yet standard softmax attention incurs a KV cache that grows linearly with sequence length, quickly becoming the bottleneck for long context inference.

By Xintong Yang, Hao Gu, Binxing Xu, Lujun Li, Bei Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Qiyuan Zhu, Yike Guo, Sirui Han
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

A JoLT for the KV cache: Near-Lossless KV Cache Compression via Joint Rank-bit Allocation

The paper introduces JoLT, a training‑free compressor that jointly allocates rank and precision for key‑value (KV) cache compression in long‑context language models. JoLT treats grouped prefill caches as fourth‑order tensors, applies partial Tucker decomposition along token and feature modes, and uses a rotated low‑bit quantizer for residuals, all governed by a single Lagrangian dual under a global byte constraint. Across five models from four architecture families, JoLT achieves 2–3× compression with less than 0.2% perplexity loss, and near‑lossless retrieval accuracy on LLaMA‑3.1‑8B at 64K context up to 3× compression.

By Rahul Krishnan, Volker Schulz