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. 03928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models improve accuracy through extended chains of thought, but their long outputs create a memory and compute bottleneck.
By Ting-Yun Chang, Harvey Yiyun Fu, Deqing Fu, Chenghao Yang, Jesse Thomason, Robin Jia
arXiv:2602. 10238v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The growing size of Large Language Models (LLMs) makes efficient inference challenging, primarily due to the memory demands of the autoregressive Key-Value (KV) cache.
By Luca Moschella, Laura Manduchi, Ozan Sener
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:2607. 05061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Key-value (KV) cache growth is a major bottleneck in autoregressive decoding, as memory and bandwidth scale linearly with context length.
By Lukas Hauzenberger, Niklas Schmidinger, Anamaria-Roberta Hartl, David Stap, Thomas Schmied, Sebastian B\"ock, G\"unter Klambauer, Sepp Hochreiter
BeaconKV is a training‑free key‑value cache compression technique for Large Reasoning Models that uses beacon queries—compact representatives of query clusters—to predict which KV pairs will be revisited during long‑horizon reasoning. By focusing on Thought Revisiting Tokens that re‑attend distant context, BeaconKV reduces memory usage up to 5.8× and improves throughput by over 4.3× while largely preserving cache accuracy across multiple open‑source LRMs and reasoning benchmarks.
By Janghyeon Kim, Minsoo Kim, Kyuhong Shim, Jungwook Choi