SAFE-KV: Causal Suffix Repair for Behavior-Preserving Non-Prefix KV Cache Reuse in RAG
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) reuses the same documents across many requests, making non-prefix KV-cache reuse attractive. Yet a cached document state is not reusable text: it is a context-conditioned causal state whose keys and values depend on the prefix, position, and preceding documents under which it was computed. We formulate non-prefix KV reuse as a behavior-preservation problem with full prefill on the exact prompt as the reference, and introduce SAFE-KV, which repairs a composed cache by re-encoding the causal suffix from a selected start document. On Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, prefix-conditioned composition preserves only 47.2% of HotpotQA-500 and 37.8% of 2Wiki-500 full-prefil...
| Authors | Xingjian Zhang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 10 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 October 2026 |
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