{"paper":{"title":"Compression Barriers for Autoregressive Transformers","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","cs.CC","cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"cs.DS","authors_text":"Krzysztof Onak, Themistoklis Haris","submitted_at":"2025-02-21T21:37:52Z","abstract_excerpt":"A key limitation of autoregressive Transformers is the large memory needed at inference-time to cache all previous key-value (KV) embeddings. Prior works address this by compressing the KV cache, but often assume specific structural properties of the embeddings. This raises the following natural question: Can truly sublinear space utilization be achieved without such assumptions? In this work, we answer this question in the negative. Any algorithm for attention-based token generation must use $\\Theta(nd)$ space, where $n$ is the number of tokens generated so far and $d = \\Omega(\\log n)$ is the"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2502.15955","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2502.15955/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}