D-Quant: Driftable Entropy Coding for KV Cache Quantization

arXiv:2609.19880 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-17 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-17

Updated: 2026-09-17

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Quantization — 87× in this paper · explained in 12 episodes
• KV cache — 56× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Reconstruction Error — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 7× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 7× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Benchmark — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Decode — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Decoupling — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Allocator — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Communication Overhead — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Elias — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Redundancy — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning
• Asymmetric numeral systems: entropy coding combining speed of Huffman coding with compression rate of arithmetic coding
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• SplitZip: Ultra Fast Lossless KV Compression for Disaggregated LLM Serving
• RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?
• KVComp: A High-Performance, LLM-Aware, Lossy Compression Framework for KV Cache
• GEAR: An Efficient KV Cache Compression Recipe for Near-Lossless Generative Inference of LLM
• OScaR: The Occam's Razor for Extreme KV Cache Quantization in LLMs and Beyond
• Qwen3 Technical Report

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