QV May Be Enough: Toward the Essence of Attention in LLMs

Zhang Edward

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arXiv · 2603.15665

QV May Be Enough: Toward the Essence of Attention in LLMs

Zhang Edward

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Abstract

Starting from first principles and a linguistic perspective centered on part-of-speech (POS) and syntactic analysis, this paper explores and derives the underlying essence of the Query-Key-Value (QKV) mechanism within the Transformer architecture. Based on this theoretical foundation, we provide a unified explanatory framework for the efficacy of contemporary architectures, including MQA, GQA, and MLA, while identifying their inherent trade-offs and potential optimization trajectories. We introduce the QV paradigm and provide empirical evidence for its validity. Building upon this, we propose the QV-Ka optimization scheme, which is further substantiated through experimental validation. The interpretable theoretical analysis of the QKV mechanism presented in this work establishes a robust foundation for the future evolution of large language model architectures.

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Zhang Edward. 2026-03-11. QV May Be Enough: Toward the Essence of Attention in LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15665

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