ClusterGen: Token Generation in Sublinear Time and Memory with Clustering KV Cache

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission13479 Authors

Keywords: KV cache, large language models, clustering

Abstract:

Despite the significant success of large language models (LLMs), their extensive memory requirements pose challenges for deploying them in long-context token generation. The substantial memory footprint of LLM decoders arises from the necessity to store all previous tokens in the attention module, a requirement imposed by key-value (KV) caching. In this work, our focus is on developing an efficient compression technique for the KV cache. Empirical evidence indicates a significant clustering tendency within key embeddings in the attention module. Building on this key insight, we have devised a novel caching method with sublinear complexity, employing online clustering on key tokens and online
sampling on values. The result is a provably accurate and efficient attention decoding algorithm, termed ClusterGen. Not only does this algorithm ensure a sublinear memory footprint and sublinear time complexity, but we also establish a tight error bound for our approach. Empirical evaluations on long-context question-answering tasks demonstrate that ClusterGen significantly outperforms existing and state-of-the-art KV cache compression methods in terms of performance and efficiency.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

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Submission Number: 13479