Long-context large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint and decoding cost of key-value (KV) caches, limiting sustainable deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Existing KV cache eviction methods typically apply heuristic token scoring over all heads in GQA-based LLMs.
arXiv:2606. 24467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint and decoding cost of key-value (KV) caches, limiting sustainable deployment on resource-constrained hardware.
By Xiaolin Lin, Jingcun Wang, Olga Kondrateva, Yiyu Shi, Bing Li, Grace Li Zhang
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:2606. 29563v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex tasks like question answering and summarization, thanks to their ability to handle long-context inputs.
By Shuvendu Roy, Mengyao Zhai, Hossein Hajimirsadeghi, Golnoosh Samei
arXiv:2604. 24432v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-context ability, has become one of the most important iteration direction of next-generation Large Language Models, particularly in semantic understanding/reasoning, code agentic intelligence and recommendation system.
By Chenglong Chu, Guorui Zhou, Guowang Zhang, Han Li, Hao Peng, Hongtao Cheng, Hui Wang, Jian Liang, Jiangxia Cao, Kun Gai, Lingzhi Zhou, Lu Ren, Qi Zhang, Ruiming Tang, Ruitao Wang, Xinchen Luo, Yi Su, Zhiyuan Liang, Ziqi Wang, Boyang Ding, Chengru Song, Dunju Zang, Jiao Ou, Jiaxin Deng, Jijun Shi, Jinghao Zhang, Junmin Chen, Lejian Ren, Minxuan Lv, Qianqian Wang, Qigen Hu, Shiyao Wang, Siyang Mao, Tao Wang, Xingmei Wang, Zhixin Ling, Ziming Li, Zixing Zhang
arXiv:2608. 05326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive large language model inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint of the Key-Value (KV) cache.
By Ayushman Garg, Akshita Gupta, Shaswata Bhattacharya, Abhishek Gupta, Sandeep Kumar, Manoj Kumar
arXiv:2602. 03203v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning abilities by producing long reasoning traces.
By Zican Dong, Peiyu Liu, Junyi Li, Zhipeng Chen, Han Peng, Shuo Wang, Wayne Xin Zhao
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.
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:2609.36835v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-context large language model inference is bottlenecked by KV caches that grow linearly with sequence length. This burden is especially severe for...
By Zheyu Shen, Guanhua Wang, Dezhan Tu, Mengchi Zhang, Yanjia Li, Adnan Aziz, Chunqiang Tang, Ang Li
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:2510. 07651v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable powerful applications but impose significant memory overhead, as caching all key-value (KV) states scales linearly with sequence length and batch size.
By Yuzhe Gu, Xiyu Liang, Jiaojiao Zhao, Enmao Diao