Tianrui Ma
Author directory2026
SlimKV: Joint Token-Feature KV Cache Compression with Reconstruction-Free Beacon Attention
Zihan Teng | Jiayu Zhao | Wentao Ren | Minhao Fan | Tianrui Ma | Song Chen | Weichen Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zihan Teng | Jiayu Zhao | Wentao Ren | Minhao Fan | Tianrui Ma | Song Chen | Weichen Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Long-context LLM serving is increasingly bottlenecked by KV-cache memory, especially in resource-constrained scenarios. Among existing KV-cache compression strategies, token-wise methods reduce cached states but risk information loss through eviction or condensation, while feature-wise methods reduce per-token KV dimensions but can require full-dimensional reconstruction to apply positional embedding, limiting decoding speedups. We introduce SlimKV, a question-agnostic joint token-feature KV-cache compression method. SlimKV uses low-rank-aware training to compress long contexts into beacon memory states with latent KV representations, together with layer-adaptive rank allocation. We further uncover a positional asymmetry: removing key-side RoPE affects beacon and raw tokens differently, with much smaller degradation for beacon tokens. Exploiting this asymmetry, SlimKV trains beacon KV projections under a K-RoPE-free constraint and enables latent-space attention during decoding, mitigating reconstruction latency. On LongBench, SlimKV outperforms baselines at 16×/32× compression and remains leading at 4×/8×, where it retains over 96% of the uncompressed model’s score. Needle-in-a-Haystack confirms robustness across evidence positions, and efficiency evaluation shows up to 7.34× attention speedup and 3.38× end-to-end decoding speedup over the uncompressed model at 128K length.