DuoAttention: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference with Retrieval and
  Streaming Heads
Authors: name: Guangxuan Xiao, name: Jiaming Tang, name: Jingwei Zuo, name: Junxian Guo, name: Shang Yang, name: Haotian Tang, name: Yao Fu, name: Song Han

Deploying long-context large language models (LLMs) is essential but poses
significant computational and memory challenges. Caching all Key and Value (KV)
states across all attention heads consumes substantial memory. Existing KV
cache pruning methods either damage the long-context capabilities of LLMs or
offer only limited efficiency improvements. In this paper, we identify that
only a fraction of attention heads, a.k.a, Retrieval Heads, are critical for
processing long contexts and require full attention across all tokens. In
contrast, all other heads, which primarily focus on recent tokens and attention
sinks--referred to as Streaming Heads--do not require full attention. Based on
this insight, we introduce DuoAttention, a framework that only applies a full
KV cache to retrieval heads while using a light-weight, constant-length KV
cache for streaming heads, which reduces both LLM's decoding and pre-filling
memory and latency without compromising its long-context abilities.
DuoAttention uses a lightweight, optimization-based algorithm with synthetic
data to identify retrieval heads accurately. Our method significantly reduces
long-context inference memory by up to 2.55x for MHA and 1.67x for GQA models
while speeding up decoding by up to 2.18x and 1.50x and accelerating
pre-filling by up to 1.73x and 1.63x for MHA and GQA models, respectively, with
minimal accuracy loss compared to full attention. Notably, combined with
quantization, DuoAttention enables Llama-3-8B decoding with 3.3 million context
length on a single A100 GPU. Code is provided in
https://github.com/mit-han-lab/duo-attention.