Fathom: Per-Query Read Depth for Sparse Decoding over Offloaded KV Caches
When agentic sessions run to a million tokens with many sessions resident at once, the KV cache and the index that ranks it live in host memory, and the scan that ranks all n keys for a top-k step becomes the traffic that bounds decoding. We present Fathom, a key scan in which each query decides how many bits of each key channel to read. The 4-bit K cache is stored channel-major as bit planes, so a prefix of t planes is exactly the channel's t-bit quantizer, and the query spends its bit budget by reverse water-filling over the variance-weighted importance of its channels. At one million tokens on Qwen3-8B a decode step is 1.67x faster in GPU time than with the 136-bit scans of Double Spar...
| Authors | Vivek Kalyanarangan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 15 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 September 2026 |
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