# LLMCache: Layer-Wise Caching Strategies for Accelerated Reuse in Transformer Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16843 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16843/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [DeepSpeed Inference: Enabling Efficient Inference of Transformer Models at Unprecedented Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00032/) (2022)
- [Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10866/) (2023)
- [Q8BERT: Quantized 8Bit BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06188/) (2019)
- [Right for the Right Reasons: Training Differentiable Models by Constraining their Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03717/) (2017)
- [Block Pruning For Faster Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04838/) (2021)
- [CEDR: Contextualized Embeddings for Document Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07094/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CoMem: Reusing Transformer Depth across Queries with Persistent Intermediate Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28263/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer-based language models have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, yet their high inference latency poses a significant challenge for real-timeand large-scale deployment. While existing caching mechanisms,such as token-level key-value caches, offer speedups in autore-gressive decoding, they are limited in scope and applicability. In this paper, we present LLMCache, a novel layer-wise caching framework that accelerates transformer inference by reusing intermediate activations based on semantic similarity of input sequences. Unlike prior work, LLMCache is model-agnostic,operates across both encoder and decoder architectures, and supports caching at arbitrary transformer layers. We introduce a lightweight fingerprinting mechanism for matching seman-tically similar inputs and propose adaptive eviction strategies to manage cache staleness. Experiments on BERT and GPT-2 across SQuAD, WikiText-103, and OpenBookQA show up to 3.1 X speedup in inference time with <0.5% accuracy degradation. Our results highlight LLMCache as a practical and general-purpose solution for optimizing transformer inference in real-world applications