Coleman Richard Charles Hooper, Sehoon Kim, Hiva Mohammadzadeh, Monishwaran Maheswaran, Sebastian Zhao, June Paik, Michael W. Mahoney, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

LLMs are seeing growing use for applications which require large context windows, and with these large context windows KV cache activations surface as the dominant contributor to memory consumption during inference. Quantization is a promising approach for compressing KV cache activations; however, existing solutions fail to represent activations accurately in sub-4-bit precision. Our work, KVQuant, facilitates low precision KV cache quantization by incorporating several novel methods: (i) Per-Channel Key Quantization, where we adjust the dimension along which we quantize the Key activations to better match the distribution; (ii) Pre-RoPE Key Quantization, where we quantize Key activations before the rotary positional embedding to mitigate its impact on quantization; (iii) Non-Uniform KV Cache Quantization, where we derive per-layer sensitivity-weighted non-uniform datatypes that better represent the distributions; and (iv) Per-Vector Dense-and-Sparse Quantization, where we isolate outliers separately for each vector to minimize skews in quantization ranges. By applying our method to the LLaMA, Llama-2, Llama-3, and Mistral models, we achieve < 0.1 perplexity degradation with 3-bit quantization on both Wikitext-2 and C4, outperforming existing approaches. Our method enables serving LLaMA-7B with a context length of up to 1 million on a single A100-80GB GPU and up to 10 million on an 8-GPU system. We develop custom CUDA kernels for KVQuant, showing that we can achieve up to ~1.7x speedups, compared to baseline fp16 matrix-vector multiplications, for the LLaMA-7B model.