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Dictionary entry

KV cache compression

noun

also key-value cache compression or KV-cache compression

TopicChips & Infrastructure Senses1

Definition of KV cache compression

  1. : the reduction of the memory and data-movement cost of a language model's KV cache, for example by storing lower-precision values, retaining fewer tokens, using low-rank representations, or compressing cached states between inference steps

    • KV cache compression allowed the server to handle more long-context requests within the same GPU memory budget.
    • The team measured whether its KV cache compression method saved memory without losing important information from the beginning of the prompt.
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Editorial references

Sources & further reading

4 sources
  1. Keep the Cost Down: A Review on Methods to Optimize LLM's KV-Cache Consumption arXiv · 2024-07-25
  2. KV Cache Compression NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM Documentation
  3. MoEZip: Routing-Aware KV Cache Compression for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts LLMs arXiv · 2026-10-23
  4. RIFT: KV Cache Compression for Draft Models with Complementary Compressibility Training arXiv · 2026-10-23

Test yourself

Which of these is the meaning of KV cache compression?

Related terms

KV cache memory that stores intermediate attention results for text a model has already processed, so… context window the maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a model can consider at one time… inference the act of running a trained model to produce an output, such as answering a prompt or… quantization shrinking a model by storing its numbers with less precision (for example 4 bits instead of… memory wall a performance limit reached when a processor or AI accelerator can perform calculations faster… throughput how much work an AI system can handle in a given time, often measured in tokens per second latency the delay between sending a request to a model and getting a response, often measured as time…

Cite this entry

"KV cache compression." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/kv-cache-compression/. Accessed 23 Oct. 2026.

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