Keyless Attention: Value-Space Routing and Value-Only Caching for Efficient Transformers
Transformer architectures form the foundation of modern natural language processing, yet the Key-Value (KV) cache introduces substantial memory and bandwidth overhead during long-context generation, increasingly bottlenecking large-scale deployment. We propose Keyless Attention, a novel attention mechanism that replaces the conventional key projection with a dedicated value-space routing projection, eliminating key representations from the attention computation entirely and yielding a Value-Only Cache that reduces KV-cache memory by 50% while improving decode throughput. Experiments across multiple models and architectures demonstrate that Keyless Attention achieves comparable perplexity ...
| Authors | Xin Gao, Xingming Xu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 July 2026 |
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