aiqbench analysis
AvoKV-E addresses the KV-cache bottleneck in long-reasoning tasks by shifting focus from simple key recurrence to preserving critical value payloads that sustain reasoning trajectories. This training-free policy improves model performance in tight-cache regimes by balancing read pressure, redundancy, and payload potential without requiring additional training data. The results highlight a necessary evolution in memory management strategies for extended context generation.
AvoKV-E: Payload-Aware KV Cache Eviction for Long Reasoning
arXiv:2610.03007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-output reasoning shifts the KV-cache bottleneck from the fixed prompt to the generated trace. Existing reasoning-cache eviction methods largely treat cached entries as routing objects, estimating whether an old key will still be read, will recur, or can be replaced. This routing-only view overlooks two effects: low-attention entries can carry large value payloads whose removal changes future predictions, and newly generated states can appear stale before later queries have had a chance to read them. We introduce AvoKV-E, a training-free eviction policy that first delays eligibility for recent states and then ranks eligible entries using candidate-normalized read pressure, key redundancy, and value-payload potential. According to empirical evaluation across different models and datasets, AvoKV-E matches or exceeds redundancy-aware, recurrence-based, and thought-adaptive eviction baselines at matched active-KV budgets, with its largest gains in the tightest-cache regime. Component and counterfactual analyses further connect these gains to delayed observation, payload-aware scoring, redundancy, and scale-robust normalization. Together, the results show that long-reasoning KV eviction should preserve not only keys that are likely to be read, but also the value payloads that sustain the reasoning trajectory.
Abstract:Long-output reasoning shifts the KV-cache bottleneck from the fixed prompt to the generated trace. Existing reasoning-cache eviction methods largely treat cached entries as routing objects, estimating whether an old key will still be read, will recur, or can be replaced. This routing-only view overlooks two effects: low-attention entries can carry large value payloads whose removal changes future predictions, and newly generated states can appear stale before later queries have had a chance to read them. We introduce AvoKV-E, a training-free eviction policy that first delays eligibility for recent states and then ranks eligible entries using candidate-normalized read pressure, key redundancy, and value-payload potential. According to empirical evaluation across different models and datasets, AvoKV-E matches or exceeds redundancy-aware, recurrence-based, and thought-adaptive eviction baselines at matched active-KV budgets, with its largest gains in the tightest-cache regime. Component and counterfactual analyses further connect these gains to delayed observation, payload-aware scoring, redundancy, and scale-robust normalization. Together, the results show that long-reasoning KV eviction should preserve not only keys that are likely to be read, but also the value payloads that sustain the reasoning trajectory.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2610.03007 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.03007v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.03007 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 277 words
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