FreqDepthKV: Frequency-Guided Depth Sharing for Robust KV Cache Compression in Long-Context LLM Inference

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06519v1
• Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:26:28 GMT
• Title: FreqDepthKV: Frequency-Guided Depth Sharing for Robust KV Cache Compression in Long-Context LLM Inference
• Abstract summary: FreqDepthKV is an inference-time cache compression method that factorizes adjacent-layer KV states into shared low-frequency depth components and sparse high-frequency residuals.<n>A lightweight online probe assigns attention heads to shared-depth, residual-depth, or exact cache modes according to their contribution to reconstruction-sensitive attention logits.<n>Across long-context question answering, needle retrieval, summarization, and code generation benchmarks, FreqDepthKV preserves task accuracy under substantially smaller cache budgets.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Long-context LLM inference is increasingly limited by the memory and bandwidth cost of KV caches, yet aggressive compression can remove the layer-specific evidence needed for retrieval and multi-step reasoning. We introduce FreqDepthKV, an inference-time cache compression method that factorizes adjacent-layer KV states into shared low-frequency depth components and sparse high-frequency residuals. A lightweight online probe assigns attention heads to shared-depth, residual-depth, or exact cache modes according to their contribution to reconstruction-sensitive attention logits, allowing the compression policy to adapt to prompt structure without retraining. Across long-context question answering, needle retrieval, summarization, and code generation benchmarks, FreqDepthKV preserves task accuracy under substantially smaller cache budgets. With a 32k-token prefill window, FreqDepthKV reaches 58.3 Exact Match, 63.0 F1, 32.5 ROUGE-L, and 48.1 pass@1, closely matching full KV while outperforming prior compressed-cache methods. It also improves decoding throughput to 70.4 tokens/s, reduces TTFT to 2.06 seconds, and lowers peak KV memory to 6.2 GB, achieving a 3.9x effective compression ratio.

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