arXiv Machine Learning By Adam Deng, Shicheng Liu, Yada Zhu

Close Enough is Nowhere Near: Fidelity-Consumability Decoupling in KV Caches

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The paper investigates whether a frozen transformer can use another model’s KV cache as a substitute for its own, finding that this approach fails because the reader only accepts caches within a narrow tolerable set. Experimental results show that none of eight substitution methods improve performance over a baseline, while a different strategy—adding the sender’s cache as extra context and only adapting queries—does outperform the baseline. The authors conclude that pursuing faithful cache substitution is misguided and that augmenting the reader’s own cache is the more promising direction.

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