Compressing KV Cache for Long-Context LLM Inference with Inter-Layer Attention Similarity

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02252v1
• Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2024 08:29:27 GMT
• Title: Compressing KV Cache for Long-Context LLM Inference with Inter-Layer Attention Similarity
• Authors: Da Ma, Lu Chen, Situo Zhang, Yuxun Miao, Su Zhu, Zhi Chen, Hongshen Xu, Hanqi Li, Shuai Fan, Lei Pan, Kai Yu,
• Abstract summary: Existing methods, including selective token retention and window-based attention, improve efficiency but risk discarding important tokens needed for future text generation.<n>We propose an approach that enhances LLM efficiency without token loss by reducing the memory and computational load of less important tokens, rather than discarding them.
• Score: 24.118503938098307
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The increasing context window size in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as the GPT and LLaMA series, has improved their ability to tackle complex, long-text tasks, but at the cost of inference efficiency, particularly regarding memory and computational complexity. Existing methods, including selective token retention and window-based attention, improve efficiency but risk discarding important tokens needed for future text generation. In this paper, we propose an approach that enhances LLM efficiency without token loss by reducing the memory and computational load of less important tokens, rather than discarding them.We address two challenges: 1) investigating the distribution of important tokens in the context, discovering recent tokens are more important than distant tokens in context, and 2) optimizing resources for distant tokens by sharing attention scores across layers. The experiments show that our method saves $35\%$ KV cache without compromising the performance.

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