提出时间聚合与排序保持对解码时缓存淘汰的关键影响,提升推理速度。
What Matters for Aggressive Decoding-Time KV Eviction? Temporal Aggregation and Ranking Preservation

- 采用EMA聚合机制,保持评分排序稳定性
- 在六项基准上实现1.34-1.46倍吞吐量提升
- 适合追求高效推理的模型部署场景
解码时KV缓存压缩研究多关注评分函数设计,而时间聚合规则常被当作实现细节。在激进压缩下,指数移动平均(EMA)聚合使排序保持型评分修改在淘汰集合层面几乎无法区分。值范数和熵变体与注意力高度相关,保留集基本不变;而KeyDiff、键范数、新近性及学习型评分会改变排序并显著退化。我们发现这种稳定性源于聚合机制对层权重与时间保留的耦合。基于此,提出基于EMA的InertiaKV及其周期刷新变体InertiaKV-Lazy,相较全刷新版本提速1.34-1.46倍。同时研究无评分解码:仅在首步评分一次并冻结排名,平均质量变化+0.03,且无需后续评分。在六种开源模型及LongBench、LongBench-v2、RULER基准上,验证了时间聚合与排序保持是独立且关键的设计因素,并非否定评分质量本身的重要性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Decoding-time KV cache compression research focuses heavily on designing better token scoring functions, while the temporal rule that aggregates scores across decode steps is often treated as an implementation detail. Under aggressive KV compression, we find that exponential-moving-average (EMA) aggregation makes approximately order-preserving scorer modifications largely indistinguishable at the eviction-set level. Value-norm and entropy variants remain highly correlated with attention and produce nearly unchanged retention sets, whereas KeyDiff, key norm, recency, and a learned scorer alter the ranking and degrade substantially. We associate this stability with the evaluated aggregation, which couples layer weighting and temporal retention. Building on this observation, we introduce InertiaKV, an EMA-based decoding-time eviction method, and InertiaKV-Lazy, its periodic-refresh variant, which yields 1.34-1.46x decode throughput relative to full refresh InertiaKV. We also study Score-Free decoding as a separate empirical operating point: it scores the full context once at the first decode step, freezes that ranking, and incurs an average quality change of +0.03 while removing all subsequent scoring. Across six open-weight backbones and the LongBench, LongBench-v2, and RULER benchmarks, the results identify temporal aggregation and ranking preservation as distinct, consequential design factors; they do not imply that scoring quality is irrelevant in general.
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