# ECHO-LLaMA: Efficient Caching for High-Performance LLaMA Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17331 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17331/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [C-Eval: A Multi-Level Multi-Discipline Chinese Evaluation Suite for Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08322/) (2023)
- [Gated Linear Attention Transformers with Hardware-Efficient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06635/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13848/) (2023)
- [InfiniGen: Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models with Dynamic KV Cache Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19707/) (2024)
- [You Only Cache Once: Decoder-Decoder Architectures for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05254/) (2024)
- [Keyformer: KV Cache Reduction through Key Tokens Selection for Efficient Generative Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09054/) (2024)
- [RazorAttention: Efficient KV Cache Compression Through Retrieval Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15891/) (2024)
- [Beyond KV Caching: Shared Attention for Efficient LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12866/) (2024)
- [GQKVA: Efficient Pre-training of Transformers by Grouping Queries, Keys, and Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03426/) (2023)
- [Training Acceleration of Low-Rank Decomposed Networks using Sequential Freezing and Rank Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03824/) (2023)
- [Speeding up Resnet Architecture with Layers Targeted Low Rank Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12412/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [LoRA-Drop: Temporal LoRA Decoding for Efficient LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02569/) (2026)
- [EPAS: Efficient Training with Progressive Activation Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19089/) (2026)
- [KV-Pipe: On the Relation Between KV Sharing and Pipeline Parallel Efficiency in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15943/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces ECHO-LLaMA, an efficient LLaMA architecture designed to improve both the training speed and inference throughput of LLaMA architectures while maintaining its learning capacity. ECHO-LLaMA transforms LLaMA models into shared KV caching across certain layers, significantly reducing KV computational complexity while maintaining or improving language performance. Experimental results demonstrate that ECHO-LLaMA achieves up to 77% higher token-per-second throughput during training, up to 16% higher Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU), and up to 14% lower loss when trained on an equal number of tokens. Furthermore, on the 1.1B model, ECHO-LLaMA delivers approximately 7% higher test-time throughput compared to the baseline. By introducing a computationally efficient adaptation mechanism, ECHO-LLaMA offers a scalable and cost-effective solution for pretraining and finetuning large language models, enabling faster and more resource-efficient training without compromising performance.