arXiv Computation and Language

KVShareArena: KV-Cache Reuse Across Contexts and Model Checkpoints

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
1d ago

Contiguity, Not Importance: Budgeted Repair of Stale KV Caches After Document Edits

The paper investigates how to efficiently repair stale key-value (KV) caches in retrieval‑augmented generation systems after document edits. It proposes a budgeted in‑place recomputation approach and evaluates training‑free position‑selection policies on a factual RAG benchmark. Across three model families, a contiguous edit‑local window consistently recovers most of the post‑edit answer quality while being 13–21 times faster than a full re‑prefill, though its effectiveness diminishes when answer‑bearing text moves downstream.

By Mingyang Mao, Wyatt Mackey, Xiaomin Lin