Memory as a cache: Exact context reuse and deletion by construction
The KV cache of a transformer entangles every token's representation with its entire prefix: a passage encoded once cannot be reused under a different prefix or removed without recomputing everything after it, so exact cache reuse is limited to shared prefixes. We present SMem, an architecture whose context representation is a cache by construction. A block-local encoder maps each block to memory rows independently of other blocks, and a reader conditions generation on their union through cross-attention. For every parameter setting, memory composes exactly at fixed block indices, deleting a block is an exact $O(b)$ update for $b$-token blocks, and the memory state is independent of the e...
| Authors | Shengyao Wang, Jiang Liu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 26 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
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