CORM: Cache Optimization With Recent Message For Large Language Model Inference

Dai Jincheng, Huang Zhuowei, Jiang Haiyun, Chen Chen, Cai Deng, Bi Wei, Shi Shuming. Arxiv 2024

[Paper]    
Attention Mechanism Efficiency And Optimization Fine Tuning Model Architecture Pretraining Methods Reinforcement Learning Training Techniques Transformer

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, necessitate substantial GPU memory and consume significant computational resources. Beyond the memory taken up by model weights, the memory used by the KV cache rises linearly with sequence length, becoming a primary bottleneck for inference. In this paper, we introduce an innovative method for optimizing the KV cache, which considerably minimizes its memory footprint. Upon thorough investigation, we discover that in most Transformer models, (i) there is a striking similarity between adjacent tokens’ query vectors, and (ii) the attention calculation of the current query can rely exclusively on the attention information of a small fraction of preceding queries. Based on these observations, we present CORM, a KV cache eviction policy that dynamically retains essential key-value pairs for inference without the need for model fine-tuning. Our validation shows that CORM reduces the inference memory usage of KV cache by up to 70% with negligible performance degradation across six tasks in LongBench. Furthermore, we demonstrate that CORM is compatible with GQA for further compression rate.

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