arXiv Machine Learning

Learning to Evict from Key-Value Cache

arXiv:2602. 10238v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The growing size of Large Language Models (LLMs) makes efficient inference challenging, primarily due to the memory demands of the autoregressive Key-Value (KV) cache.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

IndexMem: Learned KV-Cache Eviction with Latent Memory for Long-Context LLM Inference

arXiv:2605. 25475v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to operate over long contexts, yet standard softmax attention incurs a KV cache that grows linearly with sequence length, quickly becoming the bottleneck for long context inference.

By Xintong Yang, Hao Gu, Binxing Xu, Lujun Li, Bei Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Qiyuan Zhu, Yike Guo, Sirui Han
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

StepKV: Step-Aware KV Cache Compression for LLM Agents

StepKV introduces a step-aware approach to compressing the key-value cache used during large language model inference, treating reasoning steps as primary units of retention rather than individual tokens. By linking cache entries to the steps that generated them and estimating each step’s utility from trajectory signals, StepKV assigns a combined token‑ and step‑level score to guide pruning. Experiments on multi‑hop question answering and long‑horizon web reasoning show that StepKV maintains accuracy even under tight cache budgets, outperforming token‑level baselines that suffer sharp performance drops.

By Boyu Feng, Jiahong Liu, Yifan Li, Wenhao Yu, Zexuan Qiu, Yuliang Sun, Ming Shen, Xiang Li, Quanyu Dai, Irwin King
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

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
arXiv AI
Jul 13

KV-PRM: Efficient Process Reward Modeling via KV-Cache Transfer for Multi-Agent Test-Time Scaling

arXiv:2607. 09153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Process Reward Models (PRMs) have been proven to be highly effective in guiding test-time scaling (TTS) methods, which significantly boost the capabilities of LLM-based multi-agent systems.

By Peng Kuang, Haibo Jin, Xiaoyu Han, Yanli Wang, Xiaopeng Yuan, Ye Yu, Kaidi Xu, Haohan Wang