LORC: Low-Rank Compression for LLMs KV Cache with a Progressive Compression Strategy

The Key-Value (KV) cache is a crucial component in serving transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs), enabling faster inference by storing previously computed KV vectors. However, its memory consumption scales linearly with sequence length and batch size, posing a significant bottleneck in LLM deployment. Existing approaches to mitigate this issue include: (1) efficient attention variants integrated in upcycling stages, which requires extensive parameter tuning thus unsuitable to pre-trained LLMs; (2) KV cache compression at test time, primarily through token eviction policies, which often overlook inter-layer dependencies and can be task-specific.This paper introduces an orthogonal approach to KV cache compression. We propose a low-rank approximation of KV weight matrices, allowing for plug-in integration with existing transformer-based LLMs without model retraining. To effectively compress KV cache at the weight level, we adjust for layerwise sensitivity and propose a progressive compression strategy, guided by the condition numbers of KV weight matrices. Our method is designed to function without model tuning in upcycling stages or task-specific profiling in test stages. Experiments with LLaMA models ranging from 8B to 70B parameters across various tasks show that our approach significantly reduces the GPU memory footprint while maintaining performance.