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Reducing Transformer Key-Value Cache Size with Cross-Layer Attention
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Key-value (KV) caching plays an essential role in accelerating decoding for transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, the amount of memory required to store the KV cache can become prohibitive at long sequence lengths and large batch sizes. Since the invention of the transformer, two of the most effective interventions discovered for reducing the size of the KV cache have been Multi-Query Attention (MQA) and its generalization, Grouped-Query Attention (GQA). MQA and GQA both modify the design of the attention block so that multiple query heads can share a single key/value head, reducing the number of distinct key/value heads by a large factor while only minimally degrading accuracy. In this paper, we show that it is possible to take Multi-Query Attention a step further by also sharing key and value heads between adjacent layers, yielding a new attention design we call Cross-Layer Attention (CLA). With CLA, we find that it is possible to reduce the size of the KV cache by another 2x while maintaining nearly the same accuracy as unmodified MQA. In experiments training 1B- and 3B-parameter models from scratch, we demonstrate that CLA provides a Pareto improvement over the memory/accuracy tradeoffs which are possible with traditional MQA, enabling inference with longer sequence lengths and larger batch sizes than would otherwise be possible
Forward citations
Cited by 8 Pith papers
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Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach
A recurrent-depth architecture enables language models to improve reasoning performance by iterating computation in latent space, achieving gains equivalent to much larger models on benchmarks.
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Semantic Integrity Matters: Benchmarking and Preserving High-Density Reasoning in KV Cache Compression
KV cache compression causes task-dependent degradation in high-density reasoning due to disrupted CoT links; ShotKV mitigates this by preserving few-shot examples as indivisible semantic units through phase separation...
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What to Keep, What to Forget: A Rate--Distortion View of Memory Compaction in LLMs and Agents
KV-cache eviction, prompt compression, recurrent state bounding, and agent memory consolidation are unified as one rate-distortion problem with a shared lower bound, shared failure mode, and transferable mechanisms.
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Do Value Vectors in Deep Layers Need Context from the Residual Stream?
Deeper transformer layers benefit from context-free token-specific value vectors in a Bank of Values lookup table, improving performance over standard attention with less compute.
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Memory-Efficient Looped Transformer: Decoupling Compute from Memory in Looped Language Models
MELT decouples reasoning depth from memory in looped LLMs by sharing a single gated KV cache per layer and using two-phase chunk-wise distillation from Ouro, delivering constant memory use while matching or beating st...
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Memory-Efficient Looped Transformer: Decoupling Compute from Memory in Looped Language Models
MELT decouples reasoning depth from memory in looped language models by sharing a single gated KV cache per layer and training it via chunk-wise distillation from Ouro starting models.
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Stochastic KV Routing: Enabling Adaptive Depth-Wise Cache Sharing
Stochastic training with random cross-layer KV attention enables depth-wise cache sharing in transformers, cutting memory footprint while preserving or improving performance.
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LightTransfer: Your Long-Context LLM is Secretly a Hybrid Model with Effortless Adaptation
LightTransfer identifies lazy layers in LLMs like LLaMA and replaces their attention with streaming attention to form hybrid models, delivering up to 2.17x throughput with under 1.5% drop on LongBench and strong resul...
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