Fathom: Per-Query Read Depth for Sparse Decoding over Offloaded KV Caches
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
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.
The paper introduces a multi‑shell decoder for Leech‑lattice vector quantization, achieving the best reported 2‑bit quality under its evaluation protocol. It presents a GPU‑friendly layout that fuses dequantization with matrix‑vector multiplication, demonstrating significant speed and memory advantages over traditional one‑hot masks and other 4‑bit methods. Experiments show the new kernel outperforms baseline approaches across multiple model sizes, with measurable gains in throughput and reduced byte traffic.
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. 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:2606. 20474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context-heavy agents place unusual pressure on the key-value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized.
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.