Rethinking KV Cache Eviction via a Unified Information-Theoretic Objective
Key-Value (KV) caching is essential for large language model inference, yet its memory overhead poses a critical bottleneck for long-context generation. Existing eviction policies predominantly rely on empirical heuristics, lacking a rigorous theoretical foundation. This work rethinks KV cache eviction through the lens of the Information Bottleneck principle. Under a linear-Gaussian surrogate of attention, we derive a closed-form mutual information objective that characterizes the effective information capacity of a retained KV cache subset. This formulation reveals that a wide range of existing eviction strategies can be interpreted as different approximations of the same capacity-maximi...
| Authors | Jiaming Yang, Chenwei Tang, Liangli Zhen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 28 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 August 2026 |
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