IAM: Efficient Inference through Attention Mapping between Different-scale LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhao, Yi, Li, Zuchao, Zhao, Hai
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhao, Yi
Li, Zuchao
Zhao, Hai
author_facet Zhao, Yi
Li, Zuchao
Zhao, Hai
contents LLMs encounter significant challenges in resource consumption nowadays, especially with long contexts. Despite extensive efforts dedicate to enhancing inference efficiency, these methods primarily exploit internal sparsity within the models, without leveraging external information for optimization. We identify the high similarity of attention matrices across different-scale LLMs, which offers a novel perspective for optimization. We first conduct a comprehensive analysis of how to measure similarity, how to select mapping Layers and whether mapping is consistency. Based on these insights, we introduce the IAM framework, which achieves dual benefits of accelerated attention computation and reduced KV cache usage by performing attention mapping between small and large LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that IAM can accelerate prefill by 15% and reduce KV cache usage by 22.1% without appreciably sacrificing performance. Experiments on different series of models show the generalizability of IAM. Importantly, it is also orthogonal to many existing KV cache optimization methods, making it a versatile addition to the current toolkit for enhancing LLM efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_11953
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IAM: Efficient Inference through Attention Mapping between Different-scale LLMs
Zhao, Yi
Li, Zuchao
Zhao, Hai
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
LLMs encounter significant challenges in resource consumption nowadays, especially with long contexts. Despite extensive efforts dedicate to enhancing inference efficiency, these methods primarily exploit internal sparsity within the models, without leveraging external information for optimization. We identify the high similarity of attention matrices across different-scale LLMs, which offers a novel perspective for optimization. We first conduct a comprehensive analysis of how to measure similarity, how to select mapping Layers and whether mapping is consistency. Based on these insights, we introduce the IAM framework, which achieves dual benefits of accelerated attention computation and reduced KV cache usage by performing attention mapping between small and large LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that IAM can accelerate prefill by 15% and reduce KV cache usage by 22.1% without appreciably sacrificing performance. Experiments on different series of models show the generalizability of IAM. Importantly, it is also orthogonal to many existing KV cache optimization methods, making it a versatile addition to the current toolkit for enhancing LLM efficiency.
title IAM: Efficient Inference through Attention Mapping between Different-scale LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11953