How Query Visibility Changes KV-Cache Compression Rankings: A Matched-Budget Audit
KV-cache compression methods are predominantly evaluated with the query appended to the context before compression -- a query-aware protocol. Yet the economic case for a compressed KV cache is reuse: compress a document once, answer many future questions against it. In that deployment, compression must happen query-agnostic -- before any question is seen. We present a matched-budget audit of six published compression methods against three trivial baselines on three open 7-9B models (144,300 paired evaluations on RULER-8192; 40,800 on LongBench; 50,000-resample paired bootstrap throughout). Everything is held fixed -- model, compression ratio, instances, decoding -- except the scoring rule...
| Authors | Daming Luo, Christy Liang, Junyu Xuan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 11 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 July 2026 |
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