FastKV: Decoupling of Context Reduction and KV Cache Compression for Prefill-Decoding Acceleration

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Jo, Dongwon, Song, Jiwon, Kim, Yulhwa, Kim, Jae-Joon
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866915943859355648
author Jo, Dongwon
Song, Jiwon
Kim, Yulhwa
Kim, Jae-Joon
author_facet Jo, Dongwon
Song, Jiwon
Kim, Yulhwa
Kim, Jae-Joon
contents While large language models (LLMs) excel at handling long-context sequences, they require substantial prefill computation and key-value (KV) cache, which can heavily burden computational efficiency and memory usage in both prefill and decoding stages. Recent works that compress KV caches with prefill acceleration reduce this cost but inadvertently tie the prefill compute reduction to the decoding KV budget. This coupling arises from overlooking the layer-dependent variation of critical context, often leading to accuracy degradation. To address this issue, we introduce FastKV, a KV cache compression framework designed to reduce latency in both prefill and decoding by leveraging the stabilization of token importance in later layers. FastKV performs full-context computation until a Token-Selective Propagation (TSP) layer, which forwards only the most informative tokens to subsequent layers. From these propagated tokens, FastKV independently selects salient KV entries for caching, thereby decoupling KV budget from the prefill compute reduction based on the TSP decision. This independent control of the TSP rate and KV retention rate enables flexible optimization of efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results show that FastKV achieves speedups of up to 1.82$\times$ in prefill and 2.87$\times$ in decoding compared to the full-context baseline, while matching the accuracy of the decoding-only baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/dongwonjo/FastKV.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_01068
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FastKV: Decoupling of Context Reduction and KV Cache Compression for Prefill-Decoding Acceleration
Jo, Dongwon
Song, Jiwon
Kim, Yulhwa
Kim, Jae-Joon
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
While large language models (LLMs) excel at handling long-context sequences, they require substantial prefill computation and key-value (KV) cache, which can heavily burden computational efficiency and memory usage in both prefill and decoding stages. Recent works that compress KV caches with prefill acceleration reduce this cost but inadvertently tie the prefill compute reduction to the decoding KV budget. This coupling arises from overlooking the layer-dependent variation of critical context, often leading to accuracy degradation. To address this issue, we introduce FastKV, a KV cache compression framework designed to reduce latency in both prefill and decoding by leveraging the stabilization of token importance in later layers. FastKV performs full-context computation until a Token-Selective Propagation (TSP) layer, which forwards only the most informative tokens to subsequent layers. From these propagated tokens, FastKV independently selects salient KV entries for caching, thereby decoupling KV budget from the prefill compute reduction based on the TSP decision. This independent control of the TSP rate and KV retention rate enables flexible optimization of efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results show that FastKV achieves speedups of up to 1.82$\times$ in prefill and 2.87$\times$ in decoding compared to the full-context baseline, while matching the accuracy of the decoding-only baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/dongwonjo/FastKV.
title FastKV: Decoupling of Context Reduction and KV Cache Compression for Prefill-Decoding Acceleration
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01068