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arxiv 2501.19392 v4 pith:ABSH3VJS submitted 2025-01-31 cs.LG

Cache Me If You Must: Adaptive Key-Value Quantization for Large Language Models

classification cs.LG
keywords key-valueaqua-kvcompressionlargemodelsquantizationadaptivecaches
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Efficient real-world deployments of large language models (LLMs) rely on Key-Value (KV) caching for processing and generating long outputs, reducing the need for repetitive computation. For large contexts, Key-Value caches can take up tens of gigabytes of device memory, as they store vector representations for each token and layer. Recent work has shown that the cached vectors can be compressed through quantization, pruning or merging, but these techniques often compromise quality towards higher compression rates. In this work, we aim to improve Key & Value compression by exploiting two observations: 1) the inherent dependencies between keys and values across different layers, and 2) high-compression mechanisms for internal network states. We propose AQUA-KV, an adaptive quantization for Key-Value caches that relies on compact adapters to exploit existing dependencies between Keys and Values, and aims to "optimally" compress the information that cannot be predicted. AQUA-KV significantly improves compression rates, while maintaining high accuracy on state-of-the-art LLM families. On Llama 3.2 LLMs, we achieve near-lossless inference at 2-2.5 bits per value with under $1\%$ relative error in perplexity and LongBench scores. AQUA-KV is one-shot, simple, and efficient: it can be calibrated on a single GPU within 1-6 hours, even for 70B models.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. KV Cache Offloading for Context-Intensive Tasks

    cs.LG 2026-04 conditional novelty 7.0

    KV offloading degrades accuracy on context-intensive tasks due to low-rank key projections and unreliable landmarks; a simpler alternative improves results across models and benchmarks.

  2. 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 ...

  3. KV Cache Offloading for Context-Intensive Tasks

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    KV offloading hurts accuracy on context-heavy tasks due to low-rank key projections and bad landmarks, but a simpler strategy recovers performance across models.

  4. KV Cache Offloading for Context-Intensive Tasks

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    KV offloading degrades performance on context-intensive tasks due to low-rank key projections and unreliable landmarks, but a simpler alternative strategy restores accuracy across LLM families.

  5. KV Cache Offloading for Context-Intensive Tasks

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    KV offloading hurts accuracy on context-heavy tasks because of low-rank key projections and bad landmarks, but a simpler strategy improves results across models and benchmarks.

  6. A Simple Plug-in for Improving Eviction-Based KV Cache Compression

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    VECTOR augments eviction-based KV cache compression with three-way token routing that combines importance scoring and offline regression-based reconstructability estimation to improve quality at high compression ratios.