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Compute Or Load KV Cache? Why Not Both?

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arxiv 2410.03065 v2 pith:KN3WL7MY submitted 2024-10-04 cs.LG

Compute Or Load KV Cache? Why Not Both?

classification cs.LG
keywords cakecachecachingcomputationcachescomputationalefficiencyinference
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in large-scale online services, enabling sophisticated applications. However, the computational overhead of generating key-value (KV) caches in the prefill stage presents a major bottleneck, particularly for long-context inputs. Prefix caching mitigates this issue by storing KV caches for reuse, reducing redundant computation. Despite its advantages, prefix caching suffers from high latency due to the limited I/O bandwidth of storage devices, constraining inference efficiency. To address this challenge, we introduce Cake, a novel KV cache loading system that optimally utilizes both computational and I/O resources in parallel. Cake employs a bidirectional scheduling strategy that dynamically balances KV cache computation and loading, ensuring efficient resource utilization. Additionally, Cake incorporates an adaptive scheduling mechanism that seamlessly integrates with non-prefix caching requests, improving system throughput and adapting to fluctuating resource availabilty. Through extensive evaluations across various hardware configurations, datasets, and storage conditions, Cake achieves on average 2.6x reduction in Time to First Token (TTFT) compared to compute-only and I/O-only methods. Our findings highlight Cake as an effective and practical solution for optimizing long-context LLM inference, bridging the gap between computation and I/O efficiency in large-scale AI deployments.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. Leyline: KV Cache Directives for Agentic Inference

    cs.DC 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Leyline adds a policy-directed KV cache edit primitive with closed-form RoPE correction for agentic inference, reporting +11.2 pp cache-hit lift and +14.3 pp solve-rate gain.

  2. CachePrune: Privacy-Aware and Fine-Grained KV Cache Sharing for Efficient LLM Inference

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    CachePrune enables fine-grained, token-level KV cache reuse across LLM requests by masking sensitive segments, eliminating direct side-channel leakage while cutting TTFT by 4.5x and raising hit rates by 44% versus pri...

  3. MomentKV: Closing the Directional Gap in KV Cache Eviction for Long-Context Inference

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MomentKV maintains count, key mean, value mean, and value-key covariance over evicted tokens to guide selective eviction and provide a first-order approximation of their attention contribution, outperforming baselines...

  4. SparKV: Overhead-Aware KV Cache Loading for Efficient On-Device LLM Inference

    cs.NI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SparKV reduces time-to-first-token by 1.3x-5.1x and energy use by 1.5x-3.3x for on-device LLM inference by adaptively choosing between cloud KV streaming and local computation while overlapping execution and adjusting...

  5. Multi-Segment Attention: Enabling Efficient KV-Cache Management for Faster Large Language Model Serving

    cs.AR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    AsymCache combines Multi-Segment Attention, position-aware eviction, and adaptive chunking to cut TTFT by up to 2.03x and TPOT by up to 1.71x versus recent baselines in LLM serving.

  6. From Human Memory to AI Memory: A Survey on Memory Mechanisms in the Era of LLMs

    cs.IR 2025-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The paper surveys human memory categories, maps them to LLM memory, and proposes a new three-dimension (object, form, time) categorization into eight quadrants to organize existing work and highlight open problems.