LoRC: Low-Rank Compression for LLMs KV Cache with a Progressive Compression Strategy

The Key-Value (KV) cache is a crucial component in serving transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs), enabling faster inference by storing previously computed KV vectors. However, its memory consumption scales linearly with sequence length and batch size, posing a significant bottleneck in LLM deployment. Existing approaches to mitigate this issue include: (1) efficient attention variants integrated in upcycling stages, which requires extensive parameter tuning thus unsuitable for pre-trained LLMs; (2) KV cache compression at test time, primarily through token eviction policies, which often overlook inter-layer dependencies and can be task-specific. This paper introduces an orthogonal approach to KV cache compression. We propose a low-rank approximation of KV weight matrices, allowing for plug-in integration with existing transformer-based LLMs without model retraining. To effectively compress KV cache at the weight level, we adjust for layerwise sensitivity and introduce a progressive compression strategy, which is supported by our theoretical analysis on how compression errors accumulate in deep networks. Our method is designed to function without model tuning in upcycling stages or task-specific profiling in test stages. Extensive experiments with LLaMA models ranging from 8B to 70B parameters across various tasks show that our approach significantly reduces the GPU memory footprint while maintaining performance.

Bridging Research and Readers: A Multi-Modal Automated Academic Papers Interpretation System

In the contemporary information era, significantly accelerated by the advent of Large-scale Language Models, the proliferation of scientific literature is reaching unprecedented levels. Researchers urgently require efficient tools for reading and summarizing academic papers, uncovering significant scientific literature, and employing diverse interpretative methodologies. To address this burgeoning demand, the role of automated scientific literature interpretation systems has become paramount. However, prevailing models, both commercial and open-source, confront notable challenges: they often overlook multimodal data, grapple with summarizing over-length texts, and lack diverse user interfaces. In response, we introduce an open-source multi-modal automated academic paper interpretation system (MMAPIS) with three-step process stages, incorporating LLMs to augment its functionality. Our system first employs the hybrid modality preprocessing and alignment module to extract plain text, and tables or figures from documents separately. It then aligns this information based on the section names they belong to, ensuring that data with identical section names are categorized under the same section. Following this, we introduce a hierarchical discourse-aware summarization method. It utilizes the extracted section names to divide the article into shorter text segments, facilitating specific summarizations both within and between sections via LLMs with specific prompts. Finally, we have designed four types of diversified user interfaces, including paper recommendation, multimodal Q\&A, audio broadcasting, and interpretation blog, which can be widely applied across various scenarios. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations underscore the system's superiority, especially in scientific summarization, where it outperforms solutions relying solely on GPT-4.