The paper introduces Draft‑Guided Eviction (DGE), a training‑free KV‑cache compression technique that postpones token eviction until after drafting the first two answer tokens, thereby preserving the cache entries needed for the answer trajectory. Unlike prior methods that focus on optimizing what to keep, DGE changes the timing of eviction, allowing existing compression schemes such as SnapKV, H2O, and PyramidKV to be applied without altering their eviction scores. Experiments show DGE consistently outperforms previous approaches across multiple instruct‑tuned models, achieving near‑full‑cache performance on LongBench and demonstrating that the improvement stems from trajectory anchoring rather than changes in cache selection.
arXiv:2610.07643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most KV-cache eviction methods ask, in effect, which memory appeared important while reading the prompt? We instead ask, which memory will matter whi...
arXiv:2608. 01247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Query-agnostic KV cache eviction compresses a context once and reuses the resulting cache for arbitrary future queries, but performance can collapse under tight budgets.
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.
arXiv:2610.08811v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As context windows scale to tens or hundreds of thousands of tokens, KV cache compression has become essential for efficient LLM inference. Existing me...
arXiv:2607. 05061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Key-value (KV) cache growth is a major bottleneck in autoregressive decoding, as memory and bandwidth scale linearly with context length.
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.
Query-agnostic KV cache eviction compresses a context once and reuses the resulting cache for arbitrary future queries, but performance can collapse under tight budgets. Existing methods primarily improve which original KV pairs are retained.
arXiv:2608. 08878v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many tasks, but their Key-Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length, creating a severe memory bottleneck for long-context inference.
Long-context large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint and decoding cost of key-value (KV) caches, limiting sustainable deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Existing KV cache eviction methods typically apply heuristic token scoring over all heads in GQA-based LLMs.
arXiv:2610.06927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache of autoregressive transformers grows linearly with context length and dominates memory at long context. Most training-free r...
arXiv:2609.36835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context large language model inference is bottlenecked by KV caches that grow linearly with sequence length. This burden is especially severe for...
The paper investigates when attention maps can be compressed beyond simple sparsity, arguing that large weights alone do not guarantee compressibility. It introduces metrics such as global score gaps and weighted sums of omitted values to determine token retention for a target mass, and presents a retrieval–aggregation model to predict the impact of truncation. Based on these insights, the authors propose CertKV, a training‑free compressor that allocates a tail‑summary slot per head and distributes remaining slots according to value dispersion, achieving strong performance across several benchmarks.