arXiv AI By Yifei Gao, Lei Wang, Rong-Cheng Tu, Qixin Zhang, Jun Cheng, Dacheng Tao

Near-Oracle KV Selection via Pre-hoc Sparsity for Long-Context Inference

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The paper introduces Pre-hoc Sparsity (PrHS), a method that selects key-value (KV) cache entries before attention scoring to avoid posterior bias in large language model inference. By bounding mutual‑information loss through the dropped attention mass, PrHS offers explicit accuracy control and implements three orthogonal selectors across time, depth, and layer. Experiments on LLaMA and Mistral models show that PrHS cuts retrieval overhead by over 90%, achieves higher sparsity than HShare, and delivers significant speedups and reduced FLOPs on NVIDIA A100 GPUs while maintaining near‑dense accuracy.

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