KV-COBRA: KV Cache Compression via Co-Optimized Bit-Rank Allocation
What limits KV-cache compression at extreme bit-rates? We argue that it is not the choice of compression scheme, but how its budget is allocated across attention heads. Existing methods apply rank and bit-width uniformly, ignoring that each head has a different optimal mix of rank truncation and quantization. We show that co-optimizing rank and bit-width per head, using only standard low-rank projection and scalar quantization, dominates uniform allocation, with the largest gains at low bit-rates. Our method, KV-COBRA (Co-Optimized Bit-Rank Allocation), formalizes this as a resource-allocation problem: it balances rank-truncation loss against quantization loss within each head, then redis...
| Authors | Sihyeon Ha, Jaeho Lee, Yo-Seb Jeon |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 21 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 September 2026 |
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