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dKV-Cache: The Cache for Diffusion Language Models

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arxiv 2505.15781 v1 pith:FLYCOVZC submitted 2025-05-21 cs.CL

dKV-Cache: The Cache for Diffusion Language Models

classification cs.CL
keywords dlmslanguagecachediffusionmodelsdkv-cacheinferenceacceleration
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have been seen as a promising competitor for autoregressive language models. However, diffusion language models have long been constrained by slow inference. A core challenge is that their non-autoregressive architecture and bidirectional attention preclude the key-value cache that accelerates decoding. We address this bottleneck by proposing a KV-cache-like mechanism, delayed KV-Cache, for the denoising process of DLMs. Our approach is motivated by the observation that different tokens have distinct representation dynamics throughout the diffusion process. Accordingly, we propose a delayed and conditioned caching strategy for key and value states. We design two complementary variants to cache key and value step-by-step: (1) dKV-Cache-Decode, which provides almost lossless acceleration, and even improves performance on long sequences, suggesting that existing DLMs may under-utilise contextual information during inference. (2) dKV-Cache-Greedy, which has aggressive caching with reduced lifespan, achieving higher speed-ups with quadratic time complexity at the cost of some performance degradation. dKV-Cache, in final, achieves from 2-10x speedup in inference, largely narrowing the gap between ARs and DLMs. We evaluate our dKV-Cache on several benchmarks, delivering acceleration across general language understanding, mathematical, and code-generation benchmarks. Experiments demonstrate that cache can also be used in DLMs, even in a training-free manner from current DLMs.

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Cited by 31 Pith papers

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

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  17. Orthrus: Memory-Efficient Parallel Token Generation via Dual-View Diffusion

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  19. Consistent Diffusion Language Models

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  22. DualDiffusion: A Speculative Decoding Strategy for Masked Diffusion Models

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  23. Efficient-DLM: From Autoregressive to Diffusion Language Models, and Beyond in Speed

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