FlowKV: Enhancing Multi-Turn Conversational Coherence in LLMs via Isolated Key-Value Cache Management

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Liu, Xiang, Chen, Hong, Hu, Xuming, Chu, Xiaowen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866915537694490624
author Liu, Xiang
Chen, Hong
Hu, Xuming
Chu, Xiaowen
author_facet Liu, Xiang
Chen, Hong
Hu, Xuming
Chu, Xiaowen
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-turn conversational applications, where the management of the Key-Value (KV) Cache presents a significant bottleneck. The linear growth of the KV Cache with dialogue history imposes substantial computational costs, and existing eviction strategies often degrade performance by repeatedly compressing early conversational context, leading to information loss and context forgetting. This paper introduces FlowKV, a novel \textbf{multi-turn isolation mechanism} for KV Cache management, which can be applied to any KV Cache compression method without training. FlowKV's core innovation is a multi-turn isolation mechanism that preserves the accumulated compressed KV cache from past turns. Compression is then strategically applied only to the newly generated KV pairs of the latest completed turn, effectively preventing the re-compression of older context and thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our results demonstrate that FlowKV consistently and significantly outperforms baseline strategies in maintaining instruction-following accuracy and user preference retention from 10.90\% to 75.40\%, particularly in later conversational turns.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_15347
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FlowKV: Enhancing Multi-Turn Conversational Coherence in LLMs via Isolated Key-Value Cache Management
Liu, Xiang
Chen, Hong
Hu, Xuming
Chu, Xiaowen
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-turn conversational applications, where the management of the Key-Value (KV) Cache presents a significant bottleneck. The linear growth of the KV Cache with dialogue history imposes substantial computational costs, and existing eviction strategies often degrade performance by repeatedly compressing early conversational context, leading to information loss and context forgetting. This paper introduces FlowKV, a novel \textbf{multi-turn isolation mechanism} for KV Cache management, which can be applied to any KV Cache compression method without training. FlowKV's core innovation is a multi-turn isolation mechanism that preserves the accumulated compressed KV cache from past turns. Compression is then strategically applied only to the newly generated KV pairs of the latest completed turn, effectively preventing the re-compression of older context and thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our results demonstrate that FlowKV consistently and significantly outperforms baseline strategies in maintaining instruction-following accuracy and user preference retention from 10.90\% to 75.40\%, particularly in later conversational turns.
title FlowKV: Enhancing Multi-Turn Conversational Coherence in LLMs via Isolated Key-Value Cache Management
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15347