A JoLT for the KV cache: Near-Lossless KV Cache Compression via Joint Rank-bit Allocation
The key-value (KV) cache is the dominant memory bottleneck in long-context language model inference. Existing compression methods apply low-rank factorization or quantization independently, without jointly allocating rank and precision under a shared storage budget. We introduce JoLT, a training-free compressor that treats grouped prefill caches as fourth-order tensors and applies partial Tucker decomposition along the token and feature modes, the two axes that carry low-rank structure, while leaving the head and layer modes intact. A rotated low-bit quantizer captures the truncation residual, and a single Lagrangian dual allocates per-group Tucker ranks and residual bit-widths under a gl...
| Authors | Rahul Krishnan, Volker Schulz |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 14 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 September 2026 |
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