arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

AnchorKV: Anchor-Residual KV Cache Compression

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2608.02901 (cs)
[Submitted on 3 Aug 2026]

Title:AnchorKV: Anchor-Residual KV Cache Compression

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Abstract:The key-value (KV) cache is the primary memory bottleneck in long-context LLM inference. Existing approaches attack it from opposite ends: eviction methods permanently discard tokens, degrading performance whenever a discarded token later proves essential, while quantization methods retain all tokens at low precision but offer limited compression. We propose AnchorKV, a compression scheme that shrinks the cache by $20\times$ without discarding a single token. AnchorKV represents the cache using a small set of anchors stored exactly, expresses every other token through its most similar anchor, and refines only those whose approximation most affects the model's output. AnchorKV consistently preserves accuracy across models and datasets, retaining 99% of the full-cache score at the 70B scale, while keeping the entire context at a fraction of its cost.
Comments: Under review
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.02901 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2608.02901v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.02901
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Malik Khalaf [view email]
[v1] Mon, 3 Aug 2026 21:38:30 UTC (423 KB)
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