arXiv AI

LOCKS: Page-Local Compact Key Summaries for Efficient Long-Context Decoding

arXiv:2607. 24555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Serving large language models at long context is bottlenecked by the key-value (KV) cache, which is read in full at every decode step.

arXiv AI
Jun 24

CompressKV: Semantic-Retrieval-Guided KV-Cache Compression for Resource-Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 24467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.

By Xiaolin Lin, Jingcun Wang, Olga Kondrateva, Yiyu Shi, Bing Li, Grace Li Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

NestedKV: Nested Memory Routing for Long-Context KV Cache Compression

NestedKV is a training‑free key‑only KV cache compression technique for long‑context language models that uses global, block‑level, and sliding‑window key anchors to score tokens via multi‑time‑scale cosine anomaly. It combines these rankings with a head‑adaptive outer learner and surprise‑gated token routing, requiring no model modification or additional training. Experiments on Qwen3 and Llama‑3.2 across benchmarks such as RULER, LongBench, and MMLU‑Pro show that NestedKV outperforms existing methods when the retained cache is small, achieving up to 19‑point gains on RULER and LongBench at a 75% retention rate.

By Hong Chen, Xiang Liu, Yubo Gao, Yuxuan Fan, Bo Wang, Yuanlin Chu, Yuanguo Lin, Xuming Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Minima-KV: Retention-Preserving KV Cache Compression with Mixed-Format Paged Attention

Minima-KV introduces a retention‑preserving hierarchy for mixed‑format paged attention that keeps recent and protected anchor pages in FP8 while older pages are compressed into packed TQ3, allowing every live‑request page to remain addressable. The approach uses format‑specific kernels and a globally normalized online‑softmax merge to compute partial attention states, enabling direct heterogeneous decoding without a dense shadow cache. Experiments on Qwen3.6‑27B on a 96‑GB NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU show 3.50× compression over BF16 and 1.75× over FP8, with minimal impact on performance across long‑context benchmarks.

By Sergii Kozyrev (Minima AI, Inc), Davyd Maiboroda (Minima AI, Inc)
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Trust the Mass: Forced Weights in KV-Cache Eviction

The paper investigates KV‑cache eviction strategies for sparse‑attention models, showing that selecting the largest attention weights is nearly optimal—closing only a median 2–5 % of the gap to full attention. It further demonstrates that differences in performance between eviction methods largely stem from memory usage, with the new training‑free ContourKV allocator outperforming state‑of‑the‑art methods in most pairwise comparisons while matching their byte‑efficiency.

By Jack Shi, Jerry Gu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

ValueDiff: Value-Geometric KV Cache Eviction for Sink-Suppressed LLMs

ValueDiff introduces a value‑geometric KV cache eviction strategy for large language models that suppress attention sinks. It ranks tokens by the L2 deviation of their value vectors from the cache mean, a score that aligns with minimal‑disturbance eviction under a max‑entropy assumption. Across several benchmarks—RULER, LongBench, and MATH‑500—ValueDiff consistently retains a higher proportion of useful tokens than prior methods, especially under tight cache budgets.

By Junyoung Park, Jungwook Choi, Mingu Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 3

HeadWiseKV: Budgeted Per-Head Cache Residency for Hybrid Long-Context Language Models

HeadWiseKV is a training‑free framework that compresses the residual global key–value caches of hybrid long‑context language models by assigning each physical KV head a static, multilevel history window. It formulates cache allocation as a restricted operational rate–distortion problem and uses the SeqCalib algorithm to generate per‑head residency policies that account for interactions across layers. In evaluations on four hybrid models, HeadWiseKV preserves near‑full‑KV quality while reducing peak device memory usage by 8.59% at a 112K context length and extending the largest verified context from 114K to 161K.

By Renjie Xie, Juncheng Yang, Aoting Hu, Mingxi Zhang, Liyao Wu, Zheheng Hong, Wei Xu