The paper investigates how to recover language model quality lost when using low‑bit key–value caches for autoregressive decoding. By keeping the quantizer fixed and distilling the full‑precision cache behavior into low‑rank Q/K/V projection updates, the authors demonstrate that 4‑bit affine‑cache adapters recover roughly 54 % of the perplexity gap on TinyLlama‑1.1B and 76 % on Gemma‑4‑12B, while preserving most long‑context retrieval. Even a 2‑bit rank–token sweep can dramatically reduce TinyLlama’s perplexity, though it only partially restores retrieval performance.
arXiv:2608. 01247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Query-agnostic KV cache eviction compresses a context once and reuses the resulting cache for arbitrary future queries, but performance can collapse under tight budgets.
arXiv:2606. 24033v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing low-bit KV-cache quantizers often treat each cached key as a flat vector.
Query-agnostic KV cache eviction compresses a context once and reuses the resulting cache for arbitrary future queries, but performance can collapse under tight budgets. Existing methods primarily improve which original KV pairs are retained.
arXiv:2605. 06675v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models cache all previously computed key-value (KV) pairs during generation, and this KV cache grows linearly with sequence length, making it a primary memory bottleneck for serving.
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.
arXiv:2608. 07915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly read long inputs in the agentic era, from whole documents and codebases to conversations across many turns.
arXiv:2607. 12550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache has become the dominant memory cost of transformer inference.
The paper investigates KV‑cache eviction strategies for sparse‑attention models, showing that selecting the largest attention weights is nearly optimal—closing only a median 2–5 % of the gap to full attention. It further demonstrates that differences in performance between eviction methods largely stem from memory usage, with the new training‑free ContourKV allocator outperforming state‑of‑the‑art methods in most pairwise comparisons while matching their byte‑efficiency.
arXiv:2608.28911v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache is the dominant memory bottleneck of long-context large language model (LLM) inference, growing linearly with context length....
arXiv:2607. 07144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache dominates the memory cost of long-context autoregressive inference, and a growing body of work compresses it through quantization, eviction, or offloading.
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:2607.12550v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache has become the dominant memory cost of transformer inference: it grows with batch size, context length, and depth, a...