Homogeneous Keys, Heterogeneous Values: Exploiting Local KV Cache Asymmetry for Long-Context LLMs

Abstract

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the critical importance of extending context length, yet the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms poses significant challenges for efficient long-context modeling. KV cache compression has emerged as a key approach to address this challenge. Through extensive empirical analysis, we reveal a fundamental yet previously overlooked asymmetry in KV caches: while adjacent keys receive similar attention weights ({\it local homogeneity}), adjacent values demonstrate distinct {\it heterogeneous} distributions. This key-value asymmetry reveals a critical limitation in existing compression methods that treat keys and values uniformly. To address the limitation, we propose a training-free compression framework (AsymKV) that combines homogeneity-based key merging with a mathematically proven lossless value compression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AsymKV consistently outperforms existing long-context methods across various tasks and base models. For example, on LLaMA3.1-8B, AsymKV achieves an average score of 43.95 on LongBench, surpassing SOTA methods like H$_2$O (38.89) by a large margin.Our code can be found in this link:https://github.com/the-scale-lab/Asymkv.