KV-Fold: One-Step KV-Cache Recurrence for Long-Context Inference
We introduce KV-Fold, a simple, training-free long-context inference protocol that treats the key-value (KV) cache as the accumulator in a left fold over sequence chunks. At each step, the model processes the next chunk conditioned on the accumulated cache, appends the newly produced keys and values, and passes the enlarged cache forward; the same one-step update is applied repeatedly, analogous to foldl in functional programming. Building on the KV cache concatenation primitive introduced for latent multi-agent communication, we repurpose it as a chunk-to-chunk recurrence for long-context inference. When processing chunk t, the model attends to the KV cache carried from earlier chunks as...
| Authors | Alireza Nadali, Patrick Cooper, Ashutosh Trivedi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 12 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 May 2026 |
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