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arxiv 2403.04643 v2 pith:VUD7OM6Q submitted 2024-03-07 cs.CL

QAQ: Quality Adaptive Quantization for LLM KV Cache

classification cs.CL
keywords cachequantizationmodeladaptiveapplicationscontextllmsperformance
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The emergence of LLMs has ignited a fresh surge of breakthroughs in NLP applications, particularly in domains such as question-answering systems and text generation. As the need for longer context grows, a significant bottleneck in model deployment emerges due to the linear expansion of the Key-Value (KV) cache with the context length. Existing methods primarily rely on various hypotheses, such as sorting the KV cache based on attention scores for replacement or eviction, to compress the KV cache and improve model throughput. However, heuristics used by these strategies may wrongly evict essential KV cache, which can significantly degrade model performance. In this paper, we propose QAQ, a Quality Adaptive Quantization scheme for the KV cache. We theoretically demonstrate that key cache and value cache exhibit distinct sensitivities to quantization, leading to the formulation of separate quantization strategies for their non-uniform quantization. Through the integration of dedicated outlier handling, as well as an improved attention-aware approach, QAQ achieves up to 10x the compression ratio of the KV cache size with a neglectable impact on model performance. QAQ significantly reduces the practical hurdles of deploying LLMs, opening up new possibilities for longer-context applications. The code is available at github.com/ClubieDong/KVCacheQuantization.

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Forward citations

Cited by 9 Pith papers

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

  1. 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 ...

  2. WindowQuant: Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization based on Window-Level Similarity for VLMs Inference Optimization

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    WindowQuant performs window-adaptive mixed-precision KV cache quantization guided by similarity to the text prompt, with reordering to enable efficient inference in VLMs.

  3. 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...

  4. TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate

    cs.LG 2025-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    TurboQuant achieves near-optimal vector quantization distortion for both MSE and inner products via random rotation and per-coordinate scalar quantization, with a formal proof that it matches lower bounds within a fac...

  5. LogQuant: Log-Distributed 2-Bit Quantization of KV Cache with Superior Accuracy Preservation

    cs.LG 2025-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    LogQuant applies log-based filtering for 2-bit KV cache quantization in LLMs, claiming 25% higher throughput, 60% larger batches, and 40-200% accuracy gains on math/code tasks versus existing compression approaches.

  6. Ada-KV: Optimizing KV Cache Eviction by Adaptive Budget Allocation for Efficient LLM Inference

    cs.CL 2024-07 accept novelty 6.0

    Ada-KV is the first head-wise adaptive KV cache budget allocator for LLMs, using a theoretical loss upper bound to allocate eviction differently per attention head and yielding higher quality than uniform methods on l...

  7. Minimal-Intervention KV Retention via Set-Conditioned Diversity

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A one-function modification to the TriAttention retention scorer using greedy selection under a V-space redundancy penalty outperforms seven matched mechanisms on long-form math reasoning at budgets 64 and 128.

  8. Minimal-Intervention KV Retention via Set-Conditioned Diversity

    cs.LG 2026-05 conditional novelty 5.0

    A minimal scoring modification to TriAttention using greedy facility-location selection with V-space redundancy penalty improves KV retention at budgets 64 and 128 on distilled reasoning models under matched-memory he...

  9. Towards Efficient Large Language Model Serving: A Survey on System-Aware KV Cache Optimization

    cs.LG 2026-07 accept novelty 4.0

    A survey organizing serving-time KV cache optimization techniques into temporal, spatial, and structural system behaviors, analyzing cross-behavior co-design patterns and open challenges.