ZSMerge: Zero-Shot KV Cache Compression for Memory-Efficient Long-Context LLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10714v2
• Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2025 12:20:25 GMT
• Title: ZSMerge: Zero-Shot KV Cache Compression for Memory-Efficient Long-Context LLMs
• Authors: Xin Liu, Pei Liu, Guoming Tang,
• Abstract summary: We propose ZSMerge, a dynamic KV cache compression framework for efficient cache management.<n>ZSMerge significantly enhances memory efficiency and inference speed with negligible performance degradation.
• Score: 7.958429361868486
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The linear growth of key-value (KV) cache memory and quadratic computational in attention mechanisms complexity pose significant bottlenecks for large language models (LLMs) in long-context processing. While existing KV cache optimization methods address these challenges through token pruning or feature merging, they often incur irreversible information loss or require costly parameter retraining. To this end, we propose ZSMerge, a dynamic KV cache compression framework designed for efficient cache management, featuring three key operations: (1) fine-grained memory allocation guided by multi-dimensional token importance metrics at head-level granularity, (2) a residual merging mechanism that preserves critical context through compensated attention scoring, and (3) a zero-shot adaptation mechanism compatible with diverse LLM architectures without requiring retraining. ZSMerge significantly enhances memory efficiency and inference speed with negligible performance degradation across LLMs. When applied to LLaMA2-7B, it demonstrates a 20:1 compression ratio for key-value cache retention (reducing memory footprint to 5\% of baseline) while sustaining comparable generation quality, coupled with triple throughput gains at extreme 54k-token contexts that eliminate out-of-memory failures. The code is available at https://github.com/SusCom-Lab/ZSMerge.

Related papers

• QuantSpec: Self-Speculative Decoding with Hierarchical Quantized KV Cache [67.84112700032007]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed on edge devices for long-context settings. In these scenarios, the Key-Value ( KV) cache is the primary bottleneck in terms of both GPU memory and latency. We propose a novel self-speculative decoding framework, QuantSpec, where the draft model shares the architecture of the target model but employs a hierarchical 4-bit quantized KV cache and 4-bit quantized weights for acceleration.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-02-05T20:43:48Z)
• CSR:Achieving 1 Bit Key-Value Cache via Sparse Representation [63.65323577445951]
  We propose a novel approach called Cache Sparse Representation (CSR) CSR transforms the dense Key-Value cache tensor into sparse indexes and weights, offering a more memory-efficient representation during LLM inference. Our experiments demonstrate CSR achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art KV cache quantization algorithms.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-16T13:01:53Z)
• SCBench: A KV Cache-Centric Analysis of Long-Context Methods [61.025422435235456]
  We introduce SCBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-context methods from a KV cachecentric perspective.<n>We provide an extensive KV cache-centric analysis of eight categories long-context solutions, including Gated Linear RNNs and Mamba-Attention hybrids.<n>Our findings show that sub-O(n) memory methods suffer in multi-turn scenarios, while sparse encoding with O(n) memory and sub-O(n2) pre-filling perform robustly.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-13T17:59:52Z)
• ClusterKV: Manipulating LLM KV Cache in Semantic Space for Recallable Compression [10.003118268356017]
  Long context poses significant challenges for inference efficiency.<n>We introduce ClusterKV, which recalls tokens at the granularity of semantic clusters.<n>Experiment results show that ClusterKV attains negligible accuracy loss across various tasks with 32k context lengths.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-04T10:58:27Z)
• LoRC: Low-Rank Compression for LLMs KV Cache with a Progressive Compression Strategy [59.1298692559785]
  Key-Value ( KV) cache is crucial component in serving transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs) Existing approaches to mitigate this issue include: (1) efficient attention variants integrated in upcycling stages; (2) KV cache compression at test time; and (3) KV cache compression at test time. We propose a low-rank approximation of KV weight matrices, allowing plug-in integration with existing transformer-based LLMs without model retraining. Our method is designed to function without model tuning in upcycling stages or task-specific profiling in test stages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-04T03:10:53Z)
• ThinK: Thinner Key Cache by Query-Driven Pruning [63.13363917871414]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing, achieving unprecedented performance across a variety of applications.<n>This paper focuses on the long-context scenario, addressing the inefficiencies in KV cache memory consumption during inference.<n>We propose ThinK, a novel query-dependent KV cache pruning method designed to minimize attention weight loss while selectively pruning the least significant channels.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-30T17:59:08Z)
• Model Tells You Where to Merge: Adaptive KV Cache Merging for LLMs on Long-Context Tasks [21.815661269986425]
  We propose a novel KV cache merging approach, called KVMerger, to achieve adaptive KV cache compression for long-context tasks. Our approach is inspired by the intriguing observation that key states exhibit high similarity at the token level within a single sequence. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of KVMerger for long-context tasks under constrained memory budgets.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-11T12:50:42Z)
• Training-Free Exponential Context Extension via Cascading KV Cache [49.608367376911694]
  We introduce a novel mechanism that leverages cascading sub-cache buffers to selectively retain the most relevant tokens.<n>Our method reduces prefill stage latency by a factor of 6.8 when compared to flash attention on 1M tokens.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-24T03:59:17Z)
• MiniCache: KV Cache Compression in Depth Dimension for Large Language Models [48.03117580340151]
  Key-Value ( KV) cache stores key-value states of previously generated tokens. The size of the KV cache grows linearly with sequence length, posing challenges for applications requiring long context input and extensive sequence generation. We present a simple yet effective approach, called MiniCache, to compress the KV cache across layers from a novel depth perspective.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-23T09:43:52Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.