arXiv Machine Learning

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
1d ago

The Gating Mechanism of KV Cache Eviction

arXiv:2611.07605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: KV cache eviction must decide which entries carry information that the rest of the cache can no longer supply. A natural way to estimate this is a lear...

By Hao Gu, Xintong Yang, Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhu, Jian Yang, Qiyuan Zhu, Dezhi Li, Jingyuan Zhang, Zhizhuo Kou, Hao Wang, Bei Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Sirui Han
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Monte Carlo Estimation for KV Cache Eviction

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...

By Ahsan Bilal, Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin, Muhammad Umer, Wajih Hassan Raza, Atta Ul Asad, Young D. Kwon, Michal Valko, Dean F. Hougen
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
Oct 9

When to Evict, Not What to Keep: Draft-Guided Eviction for Training-Free KV-Cache Compression

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.

By Haeyong Kang, Chang D. Yoo
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

EpiKV: Epiphany-Aware KV Cache Eviction Without the Attention Matrix

The paper introduces EpiKV, an epiphany‑aware key–value cache eviction strategy that avoids using the attention matrix. It leverages hidden‑state shifts and recent query–key relevance to rank cached tokens, matching or surpassing the performance of existing attention‑based eviction methods while remaining compatible with fast inference kernels. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that EpiKV improves inference throughput without sacrificing accuracy.

By Steven Kolawole, Virginia Smith