UNComp: Can Information Compression Uncover Sparsity? — A Compressor Design from an Uncertainty-Aware Perspective

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission5347 Authors

Abstract: Deploying large language models (LLMs) for long-context inference remains challenging due to their substantial memory and computational demands. While techniques such as Key-Value (KV) cache compression are designed to reduce memory usage, they often neglect the structured sparsity inherent in the relationship between hidden states and their corresponding KV cache. In this work, we explore the role of uncertainty as a potential indicator of sparsity within LLMs. We propose UNComp, an uncertainty-aware framework that leverages truncated matrix entropy to identify areas of low information content, thereby revealing sparsity patterns that can be used for adaptive compression. Unlike traditional methods that apply uniform compression, UNComp dynamically adjusts its approach to compression, guided by uncertainty measures that reflect the importance of various model components. Our analysis shows that sparsity patterns, when derived from uncertainty estimates, can be exploited to reveal special long-range dependencies, such as retrieval heads and retrieval layers. This perspective not only enhances our understanding of how compression can be optimized but also provides new insights into the inherent sparsity of LLMs during long-context inference. By focusing on uncertainty to analyze the sparsity pattern in detail, UNComp reduces the KV cache size to 4.74% of the original, achieves a 6% prefill speedup, and improves throughput by 6.4× — not only delivering strong lossless compression performance, but also validating the effectiveness of the underlying theoretical tool. Our codes are submitted with the paper.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Efficient/Low-Resource Methods for NLP

Research Area Keywords: Truncated Matrix Entropy, Uncertainty, Long-context Inference, KV cache, Hidden State Compression

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Approaches to low-resource settings, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Theory

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 5347