Zhigang Wang
2026
HqeKV: Towards Hybrid Quantization and Eviction for KV Cache in Long-Context LLM Inference
He Wang | Yu Gu | Fangfang Li | Zhigang Wang | Zhenghao Liu | Ning Wang | Xiaohua Li | Ge Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
He Wang | Yu Gu | Fangfang Li | Zhigang Wang | Zhenghao Liu | Ning Wang | Xiaohua Li | Ge Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
The autoregressive inference in large language models requires repeated computation across transformer layers. While caching intermediate key-value (KV) pairs eliminates redundancy, it introduces severe memory overhead, particularly in long-context settings. Most existing cache compression methods operate solely on either quantization or eviction, based on importance estimation of cached data. However, they are limited by coarse compression choices and inaccurate importance assessment, leading to suboptimal inference quality. To address this, we propose HqeKV, a hybrid compression framework built on both quantization and eviction, offering finer-grained compression options that adapt smoothly to the varying importance of cached KV pairs. An integrated optimizer automatically selects the best compression action for each cached element, maximizing quality while insulating end-users from tedious low-level tuning details. We further design a joint K–V importance metric to provide more accurate importance assessment results so that the optimizer can make smarter decisions. Additionally, HqeKV supports flexible conversion policies across multiple quantization precision levels, to further reduce quality degradation. Extensive experiments show that HqeKV improves output quality under the same memory constraints, outperforming state-of-the-art alternatives. Code is available at https://github.com/skywclouds/HqeKV.
Towards Efficient and Effective Diffusion Language Model Inference via Semantic-Aware Adaptive Denoising
Fan Li | Yu Gu | Zhigang Wang | Fangling Leng | Zhenghao Liu | Ge Yu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Fan Li | Yu Gu | Zhigang Wang | Fangling Leng | Zhenghao Liu | Ge Yu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a powerful non-autoregressive alternative to GPT-style sequential generation, but suffer from substantial computational overhead due to their iterative parallel denoising. Existing acceleration works cannot accurately detect semantically stabilized tokens and then skip computation, leading to sub-optimal speedup in practice. This paper presents the first systematic study of convergence dynamics in DLMs. Innovative observations include the misalignment between traditionally used scalar detection criterion and the semantic convergence, and the post-peak confidence score, that wastes denoising computation and degrades inference quality. To address these limitations, we propose Ada-DLM, a semantic-aware adaptive denoising framework that encodes the trajectory of scalar confidence scores into an evolution-aware feature vector and then clusters vectors proactively and adaptively identify semantically converged tokens. Furthermore, we incorporate system-level optimizations to maximize runtime efficiency. Experiments show that Ada-DLM consistently outperforms the SOTA competitor, achieving up to 2x speedup and 19% quality improvement. That offers a practical path toward efficient high-quality DLM deployment.