dLLM-Cache: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models with Adaptive Caching

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Zhiyuan, Yang, Yicun, Zhang, Yaojie, Chen, Junjie, Zou, Chang, Wei, Qingyuan, Wang, Shaobo, Zhang, Linfeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866913882578092032
author Liu, Zhiyuan
Yang, Yicun
Zhang, Yaojie
Chen, Junjie
Zou, Chang
Wei, Qingyuan
Wang, Shaobo
Zhang, Linfeng
author_facet Liu, Zhiyuan
Yang, Yicun
Zhang, Yaojie
Chen, Junjie
Zou, Chang
Wei, Qingyuan
Wang, Shaobo
Zhang, Linfeng
contents Autoregressive Models (ARMs) have long dominated the landscape of Large Language Models. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged in the form of diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs), which generate text by iteratively denoising masked segments. This approach has shown significant advantages and potential. However, dLLMs suffer from high inference latency. Traditional ARM acceleration techniques, such as Key-Value caching, are incompatible with dLLMs due to their bidirectional attention mechanism. To address this specific challenge, our work begins with a key observation that dLLM inference involves a static prompt and a partially dynamic response, where most tokens remain stable across adjacent denoising steps. Based on this, we propose dLLM-Cache, a training-free adaptive caching framework that combines long-interval prompt caching with partial response updates guided by feature similarity. This design enables efficient reuse of intermediate computations without compromising model performance. Extensive experiments on representative dLLMs, including LLaDA 8B and Dream 7B, show that dLLM-Cache achieves up to 9.1 x speedup over standard inference without compromising output quality. Notably, our method brings dLLM inference latency close to that of ARMs under many settings. Codes are provided in the supplementary material and will be released publicly on GitHub.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06295
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle dLLM-Cache: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models with Adaptive Caching
Liu, Zhiyuan
Yang, Yicun
Zhang, Yaojie
Chen, Junjie
Zou, Chang
Wei, Qingyuan
Wang, Shaobo
Zhang, Linfeng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Autoregressive Models (ARMs) have long dominated the landscape of Large Language Models. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged in the form of diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs), which generate text by iteratively denoising masked segments. This approach has shown significant advantages and potential. However, dLLMs suffer from high inference latency. Traditional ARM acceleration techniques, such as Key-Value caching, are incompatible with dLLMs due to their bidirectional attention mechanism. To address this specific challenge, our work begins with a key observation that dLLM inference involves a static prompt and a partially dynamic response, where most tokens remain stable across adjacent denoising steps. Based on this, we propose dLLM-Cache, a training-free adaptive caching framework that combines long-interval prompt caching with partial response updates guided by feature similarity. This design enables efficient reuse of intermediate computations without compromising model performance. Extensive experiments on representative dLLMs, including LLaDA 8B and Dream 7B, show that dLLM-Cache achieves up to 9.1 x speedup over standard inference without compromising output quality. Notably, our method brings dLLM inference latency close to that of ARMs under many settings. Codes are provided in the supplementary material and will be released publicly on GitHub.
title dLLM-Cache: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models with Adaptive Caching
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06295