Beyond Token Eviction: Mixed-Dimension Budget Allocation for Efficient KV Cache Compression

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20616v1
• Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2026 03:21:43 GMT
• Title: Beyond Token Eviction: Mixed-Dimension Budget Allocation for Efficient KV Cache Compression
• Abstract summary: Key-value ( KV) caching is widely used to accelerate transformer inference, but its memory cost grows linearly with input length.<n>We propose MixedDimKV, a mixed-dimension KV cache compression method that allocates dimensions to tokens at a more granular level.<n>Our solution maintains 100% accuracy at a 50K context length while using as little as 0.26% of the cache.
• Score: 16.495900730787955
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Key-value (KV) caching is widely used to accelerate transformer inference, but its memory cost grows linearly with input length, limiting long-context deployment. Existing token eviction methods reduce memory by discarding less important tokens, which can be viewed as a coarse form of dimensionality reduction that assigns each token either zero or full dimension. We propose MixedDimKV, a mixed-dimension KV cache compression method that allocates dimensions to tokens at a more granular level, and MixedDimKV-H, which further integrates head-level importance information. Experiments on long-context benchmarks show that MixedDimKV outperforms prior KV cache compression methods that do not rely on head-level importance profiling. When equipped with the same head-level importance information, MixedDimKV-H consistently outperforms HeadKV. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance to full attention on LongBench with only 6.25% of the KV cache. Furthermore, in the Needle-in-a-Haystack test, our solution maintains 100% accuracy at a 50K context length while using as little as 0.26% of the cache.

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