DeltaKV: Residual-Based KV Cache Compression via Long-Range Similarity

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Hauptverfasser: Hao, Jitai, Huang, Qiang, Wang, Yaowei, Zhang, Min, Yu, Jun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Hao, Jitai
Huang, Qiang
Wang, Yaowei
Zhang, Min
Yu, Jun
author_facet Hao, Jitai
Huang, Qiang
Wang, Yaowei
Zhang, Min
Yu, Jun
contents The deployment of efficient long-context LLMs in applications like autonomous agents, long-chain reasoning, and creative writing is fundamentally bottlenecked by the linear growth of KV cache memory. Existing compression and eviction methods often struggle to balance accuracy, compression ratio, and hardware efficiency. We propose DeltaKV, a residual-based KV cache compression framework motivated by two empirical findings: long-range inter-token similarity and highly shared latent components in KV representations. Instead of discarding tokens, DeltaKV encodes semantic residuals relative to retrieved historical references, preserving fidelity while substantially reducing storage. To translate compression gains into real system speedups, we further introduce Sparse-vLLM, a high-performance inference engine with decoupled memory management and kernels optimized for sparse and irregular KV layouts. Experiments show that DeltaKV reduces KV cache memory to 29\% of the original while maintaining near-lossless accuracy on LongBench, SCBench, and AIME. When integrated with Sparse-vLLM, it achieves up to 2$\times$ throughput improvement over vLLM in long-context scenarios, demonstrating a practical path toward scalable long-context LLM deployment. Code, model checkpoints, and datasets are available at https://github.com/CURRENTF/Sparse-vLLM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_08005
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DeltaKV: Residual-Based KV Cache Compression via Long-Range Similarity
Hao, Jitai
Huang, Qiang
Wang, Yaowei
Zhang, Min
Yu, Jun
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The deployment of efficient long-context LLMs in applications like autonomous agents, long-chain reasoning, and creative writing is fundamentally bottlenecked by the linear growth of KV cache memory. Existing compression and eviction methods often struggle to balance accuracy, compression ratio, and hardware efficiency. We propose DeltaKV, a residual-based KV cache compression framework motivated by two empirical findings: long-range inter-token similarity and highly shared latent components in KV representations. Instead of discarding tokens, DeltaKV encodes semantic residuals relative to retrieved historical references, preserving fidelity while substantially reducing storage. To translate compression gains into real system speedups, we further introduce Sparse-vLLM, a high-performance inference engine with decoupled memory management and kernels optimized for sparse and irregular KV layouts. Experiments show that DeltaKV reduces KV cache memory to 29\% of the original while maintaining near-lossless accuracy on LongBench, SCBench, and AIME. When integrated with Sparse-vLLM, it achieves up to 2$\times$ throughput improvement over vLLM in long-context scenarios, demonstrating a practical path toward scalable long-context LLM deployment. Code, model checkpoints, and datasets are available at https://github.com/CURRENTF/Sparse-vLLM.
title DeltaKV: Residual-Based KV Cache Compression via Long-Range Similarity
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08005