Get daily analysis of the latest AI research papers with clear recommendations: read, skim, or skip. Save hours of research time every week.
No credit card required • Cancel anytime
The high memory demands of the Key-Value (KV) Cache during the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) severely restrict their deployment in resource-constrained platforms. Quantization can effectively alleviate the memory pressure caused by KV Cache. However, existing methods either rely on static one-size-fits-all precision allocation or fail to dynamically prioritize critical KV in long-context tasks, forcing memory-accuracy-throughput tradeoffs. In this work, we propose a novel mixed-precision quantization method for KV Cache named KVmix. KVmix leverages gradient-based importance analysis to evaluate how individual Key and Value projection matrices affect the model loss, enabling layer-specific bit-width allocation for mix-precision quantization. It dynamically prioritizes higher precision for important layers while aggressively quantizing less influential ones, achieving a tunable balance between accuracy and efficiency. KVmix also introduces a dynamic long-context optimization strategy that adaptively keeps full-precision KV pairs for recent pivotal tokens and compresses older ones, achieving high-quality sequence generation with low memory usage. Additionally, KVmix provides efficient low-bit quantization and CUDA kernels to optimize computational overhead. On LLMs such as Llama and Mistral, KVmix achieves near-lossless inference performance with extremely low quantization configuration (Key 2.19bit Value 2.38bit), while delivering a remarkable 4.9x memory compression and a 5.3x speedup in inference throughput.
Curated research collections loved by the AI community
Ranked by community starsYour AI research assistant that cuts through the noise
We analyze papers from arXiv, top conferences, and leading AI labs as they're published.
Each paper gets a clear verdict: Must Read, Worth Skimming, or Safe to Skip based on your interests.
Stop wasting time on irrelevant papers. Focus only on research that matters to your work.
Visualize emerging research trends, hot topics, and influential authors in real-time dashboards.
Get concise summaries highlighting the main contributions, methods, and results of each paper.
Receive curated daily or weekly email digests with the most relevant papers for you.
Start your 14-day free trial today. No credit card required.
Start reading smarter