arXiv AI

Freeze the Decoder, Heal the Encoder: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation for SVD-Based KV-Cache Compression

arXiv:2610. 10552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Comparing parameter-efficient fine-tuning recipes under a single, shared learning rate is a common but flawed practice: when the arms being compared have very different trainable-parameter counts, a shared rate can simultaneously depress the larger arms' means and inflate their variance, manufacturing a large, seemingly multi-seed-significant advantage for the smallest arm that is not a real effect.

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 AI
Oct 5

iS-KV: Online Low-Rank KV Cache Compression via Block-Incremental SVD

The paper introduces iS-KV, an online low‑rank KV‑cache compression technique that uses block‑incremental SVD to manage memory during long‑horizon autoregressive decoding. Unlike token‑eviction methods, iS‑KV retains all positions in a compact representation by keeping a recent window exact and incrementally folding older states into bounded‑rank bases, synchronizing coordinates as the basis evolves. Experiments on DeepSeek‑R1‑Distill‑Llama‑8B and Qwen3‑8B show that iS‑KV achieves high accuracy (82.6% and 89.2% respectively) while providing 4.06‑fold and 5.64‑fold compression, outperforming token‑eviction baselines under matched memory budgets.

By Yiren Zhao, Guanghui Song, Tianrui Qin, Kejiang Ye, Cheng-zhong Xu, Xitong Gao
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

AbridgeKV: Compressing Long Reasoning into the KV Cache of Learned Pause Tokens

AbridgeKV compresses long chain‑of‑thought outputs by encoding completed text blocks into the KV cache of specially trained pause tokens, freeing the original cache space. The method uses pause tokens positioned within the block, allocates cache budget per layer based on entry value, and compresses large blocks. Experiments on 446 competition problems show that with only a quarter of the original KV cache, AbridgeKV matches the accuracy and output length of a full‑KV model, while enabling faster inference and a 3.5× smaller cache per sequence.

By Jack Cai, Lijie Yang, Vasilis Kontonis, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Shivam Garg