DASH-KV: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Asymmetric KV Cache Hashing
This work addresses the quadratic bottleneck of attention in long-context LLM inference, offering a practical acceleration method that maintains generation quality.
DASH-KV reformulates attention as approximate nearest-neighbor search via asymmetric deep hashing, reducing inference complexity from O(N^2) to linear O(N) while matching full attention performance on LongBench.
The quadratic computational complexity of the standard attention mechanism constitutes a fundamental bottleneck for large language models in long-context inference. While existing KV cache compression methods alleviate memory pressure, they often sacrifice generation quality and fail to address the high overhead of floating-point arithmetic. This paper introduces DASH-KV, an innovative acceleration framework that reformulates attention as approximate nearest-neighbor search via asymmetric deep hashing. Under this paradigm, we design an asymmetric encoding architecture that differentially maps queries and keys to account for their distinctions in precision and reuse characteristics. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we further introduce a dynamic mixed-precision mechanism that adaptively retains full-precision computation for critical tokens. Extensive experiments on LongBench demonstrate that DASH-KV significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods while matching the performance of full attention, all while reducing inference complexity from O(N^2) to linear O(N). The code is available at https://github.com/Zhihan-Zh/DASH-KV