TailorKV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for LLMs

17/09/2025 18 min

Listen "TailorKV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for LLMs"

Episode Synopsis

This May 2025 paper introduces TailorKV, a novel hybrid framework designed to optimize Key-Value (KV) cache management in large language models (LLMs) for long-context inference. It addresses challenges like high GPU memory consumption and inference latency that arise from the linear growth of KV cache size with sequence length. TailorKV categorizes Transformer layers into quantization-friendly and sparsity-friendly based on their attention patterns, applying 1-bit quantization to the former and dynamic retrieval of Top-K tokens from CPU memory for the latter. This tailored approach significantly reduces memory usage and decoding latency while maintaining model accuracy, enabling LLMs to operate efficiently on resource-limited hardware.Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19586