TriAttention: Efficient Long Reasoning with Trigonometric KV Compression

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mao, Weian, Lin, Xi, Huang, Wei, Xie, Yuxin, Fu, Tianfu, Zhuang, Bohan, Han, Song, Chen, Yukang
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Mao, Weian
Lin, Xi
Huang, Wei
Xie, Yuxin
Fu, Tianfu
Zhuang, Bohan
Han, Song
Chen, Yukang
author_facet Mao, Weian
Lin, Xi
Huang, Wei
Xie, Yuxin
Fu, Tianfu
Zhuang, Bohan
Han, Song
Chen, Yukang
contents Extended reasoning in large language models (LLMs) creates severe KV cache memory bottlenecks. Leading KV cache compression methods estimate KV importance using attention scores from recent post-RoPE queries. However, queries rotate with position during RoPE, making representative queries very few, leading to poor top-key selection and unstable reasoning. To avoid this issue, we turn to the pre-RoPE space, where we observe that Q and K vectors are highly concentrated around fixed non-zero centers and remain stable across positions -- Q/K concentration. We show that this concentration causes queries to preferentially attend to keys at specific distances (e.g., nearest keys), with the centers determining which distances are preferred via a trigonometric series. Based on this, we propose TriAttention to estimate key importance by leveraging these centers. Via the trigonometric series, we use the distance preference characterized by these centers to score keys according to their positions, and also leverage Q/K norms as an additional signal for importance estimation. On AIME25 with 32K-token generation, TriAttention matches Full Attention reasoning accuracy while achieving 2.5x higher throughput or 10.7x KV memory reduction, whereas leading baselines achieve only about half the accuracy at the same efficiency. TriAttention enables OpenClaw deployment on a single consumer GPU, where long context would otherwise cause out-of-memory with Full Attention.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_04921
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TriAttention: Efficient Long Reasoning with Trigonometric KV Compression
Mao, Weian
Lin, Xi
Huang, Wei
Xie, Yuxin
Fu, Tianfu
Zhuang, Bohan
Han, Song
Chen, Yukang
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Extended reasoning in large language models (LLMs) creates severe KV cache memory bottlenecks. Leading KV cache compression methods estimate KV importance using attention scores from recent post-RoPE queries. However, queries rotate with position during RoPE, making representative queries very few, leading to poor top-key selection and unstable reasoning. To avoid this issue, we turn to the pre-RoPE space, where we observe that Q and K vectors are highly concentrated around fixed non-zero centers and remain stable across positions -- Q/K concentration. We show that this concentration causes queries to preferentially attend to keys at specific distances (e.g., nearest keys), with the centers determining which distances are preferred via a trigonometric series. Based on this, we propose TriAttention to estimate key importance by leveraging these centers. Via the trigonometric series, we use the distance preference characterized by these centers to score keys according to their positions, and also leverage Q/K norms as an additional signal for importance estimation. On AIME25 with 32K-token generation, TriAttention matches Full Attention reasoning accuracy while achieving 2.5x higher throughput or 10.7x KV memory reduction, whereas leading baselines achieve only about half the accuracy at the same efficiency. TriAttention enables OpenClaw deployment on a single consumer GPU, where long context would otherwise cause out-of-memory with Full Attention.
title TriAttention: Efficient Long Reasoning with Trigonometric KV Compression
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04921