Question Tells You Where the Answer Is: Intention-aware Long-Context KV Cache Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Liang Zhao, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Lei Huang, Kun Zhu, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Recent methods to reduce the KV cache size fail to identify crucial KVs for generation while excluding others accurately, resulting in severe information loss. |
| Approach: | They propose an intention-aware KV cache eviction method that identifies and retains crucial KVs according to the attention distribution of intention, which semantically reflects the user’s goal and determines which part of the context is relevant. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can maintain the model performance while reducing the KV cache size from 128K to 2K, leading to a 6.3x increase in decoding speed and 7.8x enhancement in memory efficiency compared to the default setting. |
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Yilong Chen, Guoxia Wang, Junyuan Shang, Shiyao Cui, Zhenyu Zhang, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Dianhai Yu, Hua Wu
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