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ThinK: Thinner Key Cache by Query-Driven Pruning

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arxiv 2407.21018 v3 pith:WHEZHNLK submitted 2024-07-30 cs.CL cs.AI

ThinK: Thinner Key Cache by Query-Driven Pruning

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords cachememorythinkpruningacrossattentionlanguagemodels
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing, achieving unprecedented performance across a variety of applications. However, their increased computational and memory demands present significant challenges, especially when handling long sequences. This paper focuses on the long-context scenario, addressing the inefficiencies in KV cache memory consumption during inference. Unlike existing approaches that optimize the memory based on the sequence length, we identify substantial redundancy in the channel dimension of the KV cache, as indicated by an uneven magnitude distribution and a low-rank structure in the attention weights. In response, we propose ThinK, a novel query-dependent KV cache pruning method designed to minimize attention weight loss while selectively pruning the least significant channels. Our approach not only maintains or enhances model accuracy but also achieves a reduction in KV cache memory costs by over 20% compared with vanilla KV cache eviction and quantization methods. For instance, ThinK integrated with KIVI can achieve a 2.8x reduction in peak memory usage while maintaining nearly the same quality, enabling up to a 5x increase in batch size when using a single GPU. Extensive evaluations on the LLaMA and Mistral models across various long-sequence datasets verified the efficiency of ThinK, establishing a new baseline algorithm for efficient LLM deployment without compromising performance. Our code has been made available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/ThinK.

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Forward citations

Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. WitCert: Sound Runtime Risk Observability and Gating for KV-Cache Quantization

    cs.AR 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    A per-request sound upper bound on KV-cache quantization error, implemented as a runtime meter that gates and repairs compression to restore quality.

  2. Rotation-Aligned Key Channel Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language Model Inference

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    RotateK uses online PCA-based rotation to align token-dependent key channel importance into a shared subspace, enabling accurate head-wise structured pruning and faster decoding in VLMs compared to prior token or chan...

  3. High-accuracy Low-Bit KV-Cache Quantization via Local Distribution Restoration

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    A learned top-K distribution-restoration layer recovers near-FP16 long-context accuracy under 1-bit KV-cache quantization.

  4. RDKV: Rate-Distortion Bit Allocation for Joint Eviction and Quantization of the KV Cache

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RDKV derives per-token and per-channel weights from attention distortion, then uses reverse water-filling to assign bit-widths from full precision to zero after prefilling, recovering 97.81% accuracy with 2.48% cache ...

  5. Graph-Guided Adaptive Channel Elimination for KV Cache Compression

    eess.SP 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    GRACE reframes KV cache channel pruning as graph optimization to find a near-optimal subset, achieving 60% compression with negligible degradation and outperforming prior methods.

  6. EchoKV: Efficient KV Cache Compression via Similarity-Based Reconstruction

    cs.CL 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    EchoKV compresses LLM KV caches by reconstructing missing components from partial data via inter- and intra-layer attention similarities, outperforming prior methods on LongBench and RULER while supporting on-demand f...

  7. Token Sparse Attention: Efficient Long-Context Inference with Interleaved Token Selection

    cs.CL 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Token Sparse Attention uses dynamic per-head token compression and decompression during attention to achieve up to 3.23x speedup at 128K context with under 1% accuracy loss.

  8. Token Sparse Attention: Efficient Long-Context Inference with Interleaved Token Selection

    cs.CL 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0

    Token Sparse Attention accelerates LLM prefill by per-head token selection with reversible decompression, achieving up to 3.2x attention speedup at 128K with minimal accuracy loss.

  9. HARD-KV: Head-Adaptive Regularization for Decoding-time KV Compression

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    HARD-KV bridges dynamic head-adaptive KV cache compression with static inference engine constraints via Cascade Cache and Logits Calibration, reporting up to 2x throughput gains on long-context math benchmarks.

  10. HieraSparse: Hierarchical Semi-Structured Sparse KV Attention

    cs.DC 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    HieraSparse delivers a hierarchical semi-structured sparse KV attention system that achieves 1.2x KV compression and 4.57x decode attention speedup versus prior unstructured sparsity methods at equivalent sparsity, pl...