AttentionPredictor: Temporal Patterns Matter for KV Cache Compression

TL;DR

AttentionPredictor is a novel learning-based method that predicts attention patterns to improve KV cache compression and speed up long-context LLM inference without sacrificing performance.

Contribution

It introduces the first dynamic, learning-based approach for attention prediction in KV cache compression, outperforming static methods and enabling faster decoding.

Findings

Achieves 13× KV cache compression

Provides 5.6× speedup in decoding

Maintains comparable LLM performance

Abstract

With the development of large language models (LLMs), efficient inference through Key-Value (KV) cache compression has attracted considerable attention, especially for long-context generation. To compress the KV cache, recent methods identify critical KV tokens through static modeling of attention scores. However, these methods often struggle to accurately determine critical tokens as they neglect the temporal patterns in attention scores, resulting in a noticeable degradation in LLM performance. To address this challenge, we propose AttentionPredictor, which is the first learning-based method to directly predict attention patterns for KV cache compression and critical token identification. Specifically, AttentionPredictor learns a lightweight, unified convolution model to dynamically capture spatiotemporal patterns and predict the next-token attention scores. An appealing feature of AttentionPredictor is that it accurately predicts the attention score and shares the unified prediction model, which consumes negligible memory, among all transformer layers. Moreover, we propose a cross-token critical cache prefetching framework that hides the token estimation time overhead to accelerate the decoding stage. By retaining most of the attention information, AttentionPredictor achieves 13$\times$ KV cache compression and 5.6$\times$ speedup in a cache offloading scenario with comparable LLM performance, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-arts. The code is available at https://github.com/MIRALab-USTC/LLM-AttentionPredictor.