Thinking Outside the Box: Retention and Transmission of Information in Sliding-Window KV Inference
Sliding-window KV inference refers to processing a sequence incrementally while retaining only a fixed-size cache of recent key and value states. It can be applied to pretrained causal transformers at inference time without additional training, while its KV-cache memory remains fixed as more tokens are processed. Because cached states are computed in the context of earlier tokens, they may carry information from beyond the current window and transmit it to later states. This study presents a series of experiments using five open-weight models spanning Qwen, Llama, Mistral, and Muse Glimmer. We investigate whether information originating outside the immediate context window can persist thr...
| Authors | Timothy DeLise, Seth Cromelin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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