arXiv Computation and Language

A Probabilistic Interpretation of KV Cache Eviction

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 23

Error Certificates for KV-Cache Eviction via Randomized Design

Deterministic KV-cache eviction keeps the top-$k$ tokens under an importance score and deletes the rest. We prove that this design cannot know what it destroyed: evicted values can be altered so that everything the serving system retains is unchanged while the true attention-output error grows arbitrarily, so no serving-time estimator of that error is consistent.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 3

The risk of KV cache compression

arXiv:2607. 01520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer inference on long sequences is expensive because softmax attention repeatedly reads from a large KV cache.

By Lukas Haverbeck, Carmen Amo Alonso, Andres Felipe Posada-Moreno, Sebastian Trimpe, Marco Pavone
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Random Attention: Rethinking KV Cache Eviction for Efficient Reasoning

The paper introduces Random Attention, a method that evicts KV cache entries uniformly at random within each attention head while preserving the prompt. Experiments on four models and six reasoning tasks show that this simple strategy matches the performance of the best existing eviction methods and achieves 32‑43% higher throughput in vLLM deployments. The authors explain that the prompt is the most fragile cache component and that reasoning traces are redundantly stored across text and attention heads, making a selection score unnecessary.

By Heng Wang, Jielin Qiu, Wenting Zhao, Cheng Qian, Liangwei Yang, Jiawei Han, Heng Ji, Silvio Savarese, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Fewer Tokens, Smaller Cache: Reward-Coordinated Efficient Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 04771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel on complex tasks through long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but their lengthy intermediate steps cause severe overthinking that inflates inference cost.

By Qiyuan Zhu, Dezhi Li, Pengyu Cheng, Tianle Chen, Jiacheng Wang, Ruijie Shen, Hao Gu, Sida Lin, Zirui Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Sirui Han
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Random Attention: Rethinking KV Cache Eviction for Efficient Reasoning

The paper introduces Random Attention, a method that evicts KV cache entries uniformly at random within each attention head while preserving the prompt. It demonstrates that this simple strategy matches or surpasses more complex eviction schemes across four models and six reasoning tasks, achieving 32‑43% higher throughput in vLLM deployments. Experiments reveal that the prompt is the most fragile cache component and that redundancy in the reasoning trace across text and attention heads protects against random eviction, eliminating the need for a selection score.