arXiv:2607. 21475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deterministic KV-cache eviction keeps the top-$k$ tokens under an importance score and deletes the rest.
Deterministic KV-cache eviction keeps the top-$k$ tokens under an importance score and deletes the rest. We prove that this design cannot know what it destroyed: evicted values can be altered so that everything the serving system retains is unchanged while the true attention-output error grows arbitrarily, so no serving-time estimator of that error is consistent.
arXiv:2609.27981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: KV-cache eviction is typically evaluated through average quality-memory trade-offs, yet a small average loss can hide requests whose utility degrades...
PAGE is a partition‑aware gated KV‑cache eviction method that reframes eviction as a per‑input admission decision. It uses a single label‑free scalar— the early‑to‑late drop in pairwise top‑k head agreement—to classify inputs into a capacity‑bound class (where eviction is catastrophic) and a dilution‑prone class (where eviction is safe or beneficial). By thresholding this drop, PAGE applies a base evictor only when necessary, reducing the harm rate in the capacity‑bound regime from 0.75 to 0.026 and achieving a 29× improvement across four models and benchmarks without retraining the evictor.
arXiv:2608.28293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The premise and promise of KV (cache) eviction is simple: higher throughput can be achieved by evicting some entries from the KV cache, at a negligible...
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.
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:2608. 05863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern models no longer keep a plain KV cache: latent caches, learned sparse selectors and recurrent states each carry the model's memory in a different form, and each fails differently under compression.
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.
arXiv:2608. 09225v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache is the primary throughput optimization in modern large language model (LLM) inference, enabling prefix reuse across requests.
arXiv:2609.10266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM serving systems already reuse KV caches, but only when the reused text sits at the very start of the prompt. Two growing workloads break this condi...
arXiv:2607. 28699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: KV-cache quantization is validated today by offline benchmark averages; a deployed system cannot tell whether compression is damaging the request it is serving right now.
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.