The Residual Stream Is All You Need: On the Redundancy of the KV Cache in Transformer Inference

1. 1Understand the role of the KV cache in transformer inference
2. 2Recognize that keys and values can be deterministically projected from the residual stream
3. 3Recompute keys and values from the residual stream to eliminate the need for the KV cache
4. 4Implement this optimization in transformer-based models to improve efficiency

ML researchers and engineers working on transformer models can benefit from this finding to optimize inference efficiency and reduce memory usage

💡 The KV cache is entirely redundant and can be replaced by recomputing keys and values from the residual stream

🚀 KV cache in transformers is redundant! Recompute keys & values from residual stream for zero reconstruction error 🤯