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...
By Beomgu Kang, SoJin Yun, Hojoon Kim, Hyunseok Seo
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.
By Pankaj Kumar, Subhankar Mishra
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...
By Renato Geh, Alex Chen, Daniel Israel, Aditya Grover, Guy Van den Broeck
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
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.
By Junyoung Park, Jungwook Choi, Mingu Lee