Paper Detail
Chao Fang, Jun Yin, Man Shi, Marian Verhelst
With the rapid adoption of long-context large language models (LLMs), the continuously growing KV cache during decoding has become the critical memory bottleneck. To tackle this challenge, we propose HiKV, a novel algorithm-hardware co-design that exploits KV cache redundancy through hierarchical importance awareness. Algorithmically, HiKV compresses the KV cache at two granularities: Stage I evicts unimportant tokens within a fixed budget, and Stage II further loads only the significant elements of each retained token, reaching compression ratios unattainable at a single granularity. Architecturally, we develop a dedicated accelerator centered on a reconfigurable importance sorter that switches between the distinct sorting datapaths each stage requires, unifying the two-stage acceleration in one circuit with minimal overhead. Evaluated on representative LLMs, HiKV achieves up to 7.95x speedup and 90% energy reduction in the attention computation over the vanilla KV cache baseline within negligible 1% accuracy loss. Under iso-accuracy constraints, HiKV outperforms state-of-the-art importance-based methods by achieving an additional 1.82~4.87x reduction in external memory accesses. These benefits are enabled by specialized hardware components that add only 8% to the system area.
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@article{fang2026hikv,
title = {HiKV: Hierarchical Importance-Aware KV Cache with Hardware Acceleration for LLM Decoding},
author = {Chao Fang and Jun Yin and Man Shi and Marian Verhelst},
year = {2026},
abstract = {With the rapid adoption of long-context large language models (LLMs), the continuously growing KV cache during decoding has become the critical memory bottleneck. To tackle this challenge, we propose HiKV, a novel algorithm-hardware co-design that exploits KV cache redundancy through hierarchical importance awareness. Algorithmically, HiKV compresses the KV cache at two granularities: Stage I evicts unimportant tokens within a fixed budget, and Stage II further loads only the significant element},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22389},
keywords = {cs.AR, cs.AI, cs.LG},
eprint = {2607.22389},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}