A Probabilistic Interpretation of KV Cache Eviction
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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:2607. 01520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer inference on long sequences is expensive because softmax attention repeatedly reads from a large KV cache.
arXiv:2604. 25975v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Key-Value (KV) caching is essential for large language model inference, yet its memory overhead poses a critical bottleneck for long-context generation.
arXiv:2606. 01563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive decoding in Transformer-based language models relies on the KV cache, whose memory footprint grows linearly with sequence length and becomes the primary bottleneck for long-context inference.
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.