Runtime-Certified Bounded-Error Quantized Attention

TL;DR

This paper introduces a runtime-certified attention mechanism for quantized KV caches in large language models, ensuring bounded approximation errors and reliable fallback to exact attention outputs during inference.

Contribution

It presents a tiered architecture with online error bounds and adaptive fallback, enabling safe, high-compression attention with guarantees against catastrophic failures.

Findings

Matches dense FP16 KV quality within noise for language modeling

Recovers from catastrophic failures in naive INT8/INT4 baselines

Provides local, per-head, per-step error certification

Abstract

KV cache quantization reduces the memory cost of long-context LLM inference, but introduces approximation error that is typically validated only empirically. Existing systems rely on average-case robustness, with no mechanism to detect or recover from failures at runtime. We present a tiered KV cache architecture that enables runtime-certified attention: INT8 keys and INT4 values are stored in GPU memory, while FP16 originals are retained in system RAM for deterministic fallback. A two-term error decomposition yields per-head, per-step bounds on (i) attention distribution distortion from key quantization and (ii) value reconstruction error. These bounds are computed online and used to drive adaptive precision selection and a multi-stage fallback ladder, which guarantees recovery to the exact dense attention output when required. Across PG-19, NIAH, and RULER benchmarks on LLaMA~3.1-8B with contexts up to 128K, the system matches dense FP16 KV quality within noise for language modelling and retrieval tasks, while recovering catastrophic failures observed in naive INT8/INT4 baselines. Value-sensitive tasks at short context expose a controlled trade-off between compression and fidelity, which can be eliminated via tighter value tolerances or FP16-value fallback. The certification is local (per-head, per-step) and does not guarantee end-to-end model correctness, but ensures that each attention computation is either bounded relative to an FP16 reference or exactly recovered via fallback. This reframes KV cache quantization as a runtime-verified computation rather than a fixed approximation. The goal is not raw speedups, but enabling safe deployment of aggressive KV compression under strict quality constraints.