XQuant: Breaking the Memory Wall for LLM Inference with KV Cache
  Rematerialization
Authors: name: Aditya Tomar; name: Coleman Hooper; name: Minjae Lee; name: Haocheng Xi; name: Rishabh Tiwari; name: Wonjun Kang; name: Luca Manolache; name: Michael W. Mahoney; name: Kurt Keutzer; name: Amir Gholami
Published: 2025-08-14 06:52:38

Abstract: Although LLM inference has emerged as a critical workload for many downstream
applications, efficiently inferring LLMs is challenging due to the substantial
memory footprint and bandwidth requirements. In parallel, compute capabilities
have steadily outpaced both memory capacity and bandwidth over the last few
decades, a trend that remains evident in modern GPU hardware and exacerbates
the challenge of LLM inference. As such, new algorithms are emerging that trade
increased computation for reduced memory operations. To that end, we present
XQuant, which takes advantage of this trend, enabling an order-of-magnitude
reduction in memory consumption through low-bit quantization with substantial
accuracy benefits relative to state-of-the-art KV cache quantization methods.
We accomplish this by quantizing and caching the layer input activations X,
instead of using standard KV caching, and then rematerializing the Keys and
Values on-the-fly during inference. This results in an immediate 2times
memory savings compared to KV caching. By applying XQuant, we achieve up to
sim 7.7times memory savings with <0.1 perplexity degradation compared to
the FP16 baseline. Furthermore, our approach leverages the fact that X values
are similar across layers. Building on this observation, we introduce
XQuant-CL, which exploits the cross-layer similarity in the X embeddings for
extreme compression. Across different models, XQuant-CL attains up to
10times memory savings relative to the FP16 baseline with only 0.01
perplexity degradation, and 12.5times memory savings with only 0.1
perplexity degradation. XQuant exploits the rapidly increasing compute
capabilities of hardware platforms to eliminate the memory bottleneck, while
surpassing state-of-the-art KV cache quantization methods and achieving
near-FP16 accuracy across a wide range of models.