Sigmoid Attention as a Better Substrate for Learned KV Cache Eviction
Read the original on Hugging Face Trending Papers →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at Hugging Face Trending Papers.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at Hugging Face Trending Papers.
arXiv:2608.23296v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learned KV-cache eviction often faces a soft-to-hard mismatch: during training, differentiable gates typically attenuate token contributions, whereas...
The paper examines why learned gates in sparse attention models offer little advantage over random gates when jointly trained with the transformer. Through experiments on a 31M-parameter transformer, the authors attribute this to routing absorption, where the model’s representations adapt to the imposed mask, diminishing the benefit of learned routing. They also explore hard masking, stochastic mask training, and the impact of trainable attention layers on gate performance, concluding that freezing the model stabilizes routing targets for effective post‑hoc sparsification.
arXiv:2610.14754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybrid language models interleave Gated DeltaNet (GDN) layers, whose recurrent memory has a fixed size, with full-attention layers, whose key-value (KV...
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.
The paper reports that chain‑of‑thought (CoT) supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) improves reasoning but systematically harms long‑context recall in hybrid linear‑attention models such as HypeNet and Jet‑Nemotron. Retrieval performance on the Needle‑In‑A‑Haystack benchmark drops dramatically after CoT‑SFT, especially with harder settings and longer contexts. The authors introduce QK‑Restore, a training‑free method that reinstates the query‑key projection matrices from the pre‑SFT checkpoint, which recovers long‑range recall while preserving reasoning gains.
arXiv:2606. 09079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conventional LLMs keep the full KV cache loaded during decoding, causing a severe GPU memory bottleneck for ultra-long context serving.