MixKVQ: Query-Aware Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization for Long-Context Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing low-bit quantization methods often exhibit severe performance degradation on complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method that uses a key channel's intrinsic quantization difficulty and relevance to the query to identify and preserve critical key channels that need higher precision. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on complex reasoning datasets show that the proposed method outperforms low-bit methods at a substantially reduced memory footprint. |
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