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Home/Glossary/KV Cache
AI Glossary Term

What does “KV Cache” mean?

Definition

Stored key and value tensors from previous tokens that let transformers generate new tokens without recomputing past attention.

Related terms

Continual Learning
Training approaches that let a model keep learning from new data without forgetting prior knowledge.
Top-k Sampling
A decoding strategy that samples only from the k most likely next tokens.
Unsupervised Learning
Learning patterns from unlabeled data without explicit target outputs.
Sliding Window Attention
An attention pattern where each token attends only to a fixed-size window of nearby tokens to reduce compute.
SentencePiece
A language-agnostic tokenizer that learns subword units directly from raw text without pre-splitting on whitespace.
Presence Penalty
A decoding setting that reduces the probability of tokens that have appeared at all, encouraging new topics.

Learn more in our free guides

KV CacheKV Cache Optimization

See also

Speculative DecodingMCP (Model Context Protocol)Zero Data RetentionAgentic LoopUsage-Based BillingReActTrust CalibrationTree of Thoughts
PreviousSpeculative DecodingNextMCP (Model Context Protocol)
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