LAVa: Layer-wise KV Cache Eviction with Dynamic Budget Allocation

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission1905 Authors

Abstract: KV Cache is commonly used to accelerate LLM inference with long contexts, yet its high memory demand drives the need for cache compression. Existing compression methods, however, are largely heuristic and lack dynamic budget allocation. To address this limitation, we introduce a unified framework for cache compression by minimizing information loss in Transformer residual streams. Building on it, we analyze the layer attention output loss and derive a new metric to compare cache entries across heads, enabling layer-wise compression with dynamic head budgets. Additionally, by contrasting cross-layer information, we also achieve dynamic layer budgets. LAVa is the first unified strategy for cache eviction and dynamic budget allocation that, unlike prior methods, does not rely on training or the combination of multiple strategies. Experiments with four benchmarks (LongBench, Needle-In-A-Haystack, Ruler, and InfiniteBench) demonstrate its superiority over strong baselines. Moreover, our experiments reveal a new insight: dynamic layer budgets are crucial for generation tasks (e.g., code completion), while dynamic head budgets play a key role in extraction tasks (e.g., extractive QA). As a fully dynamic compression method, LAVa consistently maintains top performance across task types.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Efficient/Low-Resource Methods for NLP

Research Area Keywords: NLP in resource-constrained settings, efficient models

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Approaches to low-resource settings, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency, Theory

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 1905