ART: Attention Run-time Termination for Efficient Large Language Model Decoding
arXiv:2606.00024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is severely constrained by the memory bandwidth required to fetch the extensive Key-Value (KV) cache. Most existing KV management methods rely on key-only pruning before decoding, despite the evidence that attention outputs depend jointly on keys and values, as incorporating values in their methods incurs prohibitive additional overhead. In this paper, we propose Attention Run-time Termination (ART), a lightweight run-time mechanism that tracks accumulated attention outputs during kernel execution and terminates subsequent KV block accesses once further contributions become negligible. This design makes ART orthogonal to existing key-based KV cache management methods, enabling seamless integration with them. Experiments on LongBench benchmarks show that ART achieves 20% higher generation throughput in large batch size than state-of-the-art baseline while maintaining comparable accuracy.
[2606.00024] ART: Attention Run-time Termination for Efficient Large Language Model Decoding
[Submitted on 15 Apr 2026]
Title:ART: Attention Run-time Termination for Efficient Large Language Model Decoding
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Abstract:Long-context decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is severely constrained by the memory bandwidth required to fetch the extensive Key-Value (KV) cache. Most existing KV management methods rely on key-only pruning before decoding, despite the evidence that attention outputs depend jointly on keys and values, as incorporating values in their methods incurs prohibitive additional overhead. In this paper, we propose Attention Run-time Termination (ART), a lightweight run-time mechanism that tracks accumulated attention outputs during kernel execution and terminates subsequent KV block accesses once further contributions become negligible. This design makes ART orthogonal to existing key-based KV cache management methods, enabling seamless integration with them. Experiments on LongBench benchmarks show that ART achieves 20% higher generation throughput in large batch size than state-of-the-art baseline while maintaining comparable accuracy.
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Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.00024 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2606.00024v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.00024
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Chen Qiu [view email] [v1] Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:55:14 UTC (732 KB)
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