MetaKV: Adaptive KV Cache Compression for Constrained LLM Inference
Authors: Michael Wang, Keith Li, Roozbeh Bostandoost
Organizations: Lake Washington School District · XSchool · UMass Amherst
Abstract
Key--value (KV) cache compression is an effective way to reduce the memory overhead of large language model (LLM) inference, particularly for long-context workloads. However, existing compression methods make different trade-offs among accuracy, inference latency, and peak KV cache memory utilization, making a single fixed configuration unsuitable across different prompts and resource constraints. We introduce MetaKV, an adaptive framework that selects a KV cache compression configuration for each input prompt based on user-specified latency and peak memory budgets. MetaKV uses lightweight prediction models to estimate the end-to-end latency, peak memory, and probability of a correct response for each candidate configuration, and selects the configuration that best satisfies the latency-memory constraints while preserving accuracy. We evaluate MetaKV across ten configurations from three representative KV cache compression methods, KVQuant, H2O, and RocketKV, together with an uncompressed FP16 configuration, on four datasets covering mathematics, science, commonsense reasoning, and reading comprehension. Across a wide range of latency and peak memory constraints, MetaKV consistently outperforms the best static configuration, improving constrained success rate (CSR), the fraction of prompts answered correctly while satisfying both constraints, by approximately 0.07 on average and up to 0.135. These results demonstrate the benefit of adapting KV cache compression to individual prompts and latency-memory constraints. Code is available at https://github.com/MichaelWang0505/MetaKV.git
Long-context large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint and decoding cost of key-value (KV) caches, limiting sustainable deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Existing KV cache eviction methods typically apply heuristic token scoring over all heads in GQA-based LLMs. These methods ignore the different functionalities of attention heads, leading to the eviction of critical tokens and thus degrading the performance of LLMs. To address this issue, we propose CompressKV, a resource-efficient KV-cache compression framework for GQA-based LLMs. Instead of aggregating attention scores from all heads, CompressKV identifies Semantic Retrieval Heads (SRHs) that capture both the initial and final tokens of a prompt and semantically important mid-context evidence, and uses them to select tokens whose KV pairs should be retained. Furthermore, CompressKV allocates cache budgets across layers according to offline estimates of layer-wise eviction error. Experiments on LongBench and Needle-in-a-Haystack show that CompressKV consistently outperforms existing KV-cache eviction methods across memory budgets. Notably, it preserves over 97% of full-cache performance using only 3% of the KV cache on LongBench question-answering tasks and achieves 90% accuracy with just 0.7% KV storage on Needle-in-a-Haystack. These results demonstrate an improved resource--performance trade-off for long-context LLM inference. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/TUDa-HWAI/CompressKV
Long-context inference in Large Language Models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the linear growth of Key-Value (KV) cache memory. Existing KV cache compression paradigms are fundamentally limited by heuristics: heuristic budgeting relies on statistical priors rather than task objectives, causing resource misallocation, while heuristic selection relies on coupled query-key interactions or static inductive biases (e.g., attention sinks). To address this limitation, we introduce LKV (Learned KV Eviction), which formulates KV compression as an end-to-end differentiable optimization problem. LKV integrates LKV-H to learn task-optimized global budgets, and LKV-T to derive intrinsic KV importance without materializing attention matrices. This design bypasses heuristic proxies, strictly aligning compression with task objectives. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that LKV achieves state-of-the-art performance on both LongBench and RULER benchmarks at high compression rates. In particular, on LongBench, LKV achieves near-lossless performance with only 15% KV cache retention. Crucially, our analysis identifies learned budgeting as the dominant driver of fidelity, demonstrating that data-driven allocation is essential to overcome the limitations of hand-crafted heuristics.
Long-context LLM inference is increasingly limited by the memory and bandwidth cost of KV caches, yet aggressive compression can remove the layer-specific evidence needed for retrieval and multi-step reasoning. We introduce FreqDepthKV, an inference-time cache compression method that factorizes adjacent-layer KV states into shared low-frequency depth components and sparse high-frequency residuals. A lightweight online probe assigns attention heads to shared-depth, residual-depth, or exact cache modes according to their contribution to reconstruction-sensitive attention logits, allowing the compression policy to adapt to prompt structure without retraining. Across long-context question answering, needle retrieval, summarization, and code generation benchmarks, FreqDepthKV preserves task accuracy under substantially smaller cache budgets. With a 32k-token prefill window, FreqDepthKV reaches 58.3 Exact Match, 63.0 F1, 32.5 ROUGE-L, and 48.1 pass@1, closely matching full KV while outperforming prior compressed-cache methods. It also improves decoding throughput to 70.4 tokens/s, reduces TTFT to 2.06 seconds, and lowers peak KV memory to 6.2 GB, achieving a 3.9x effective compression ratio.
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