# More Than a Quick Glance: Overcoming the Greedy Bias in KV-Cache Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02199 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02199/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in KV cache optimization, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 7 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [KV cache optimization](https://mlsanity.com/inference/kv-cache-optimization/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [Quest: Query-Aware Sparsity for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10774/) (2024)
- [MInference 1.0: Accelerating Pre-filling for Long-Context LLMs via Dynamic Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02490/) (2024)
- [BABILong: Testing the Limits of LLMs with Long Context Reasoning-in-a-Haystack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10149/) (2024)
- [InfLLM: Training-Free Long-Context Extrapolation for LLMs with an Efficient Context Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04617/) (2024)
- [Star Attention: Efficient LLM Inference over Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17116/) (2024)
- [LLMs Know What to Drop: Self-Attention Guided KV Cache Eviction for Efficient Long-Context Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08879/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [When Does Value-Aware KV Eviction Help? A Fixed-Contract Diagnostic for Non-Monotone Cache Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08234/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While Large Language Models (LLMs) can theoretically support extensive context windows, their actual deployment is constrained by the linear growth of Key-Value (KV) cache memory. Prevailing compression strategies mitigate this through various pruning mechanisms, yet trade-off semantic recall for memory efficiency. In this work, we present LASER-KV (Layer Accumulated Selection with Exact-LSH Recall), a framework designed to test the limits of KV compression under a strict accumulative budgeting policy. We deviate from the standard fixed summary size approach by implementing a block-wise accumulation strategy governed by a protection divisor (n). This allows us to isolate the effects of compression from sliding window artifacts. Our experiments on the Babilong benchmark reveal performance degradation in previous compression methods by 15-30% on various long context tasks. LASER-KV maintains stable performance, achieving superior accuracies by a margin of upto 10% at 128k. These findings challenge the prevailing assumption that attention scores alone are a sufficient proxy for token utility.