GateSight: Recurrent Memory Anticipates Attention Memory for Query-Agnostic KV Eviction in Hybrid LLMs
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Abstract (arXiv)
Hybrid language models interleave Gated DeltaNet (GDN) layers, whose recurrent memory has a fixed size, with full-attention layers, whose key-value (KV) cache grows with the context and dominates serving memory. In this paper, we ask whether the recurrent memory already knows what the attention memory will need. We first show that which GDN heads of Qwen3.8-27B keep long memories is fixed by the weights rather than by the document. Next, we define the future utility of a KV entry by how much removing it changes the attention output over the model's own continuations, and find that the write gate, decay and write magnitude that GDN layers emit during prefill anticipate this utility before any query is seen. Because the relation is spread across many GDN heads and layers, and a linear map recovers its trend but less of its high-utility tail than a nonlinear one, we propose GateSight, which learns it with lightweight per-head multilayer perceptrons that read these signals and no attention score. Their predicted utility decides which entries each attention layer keeps, and how much each layer keeps is set by the model's native attention output gate, whose mean differs by more than an order of magnitude across layers. Finally, at serving time, GateSight scores the cache once after prefill and physically releases discarded KV entries. Experimental results on SCBench and RULER-4096 with Qwen3.8-27B and, with the same recipe, the sparse-attention model Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, up to the 262K-token limit of the models, show that with a tenth of the attention KV cache, GateSight is the most accurate of five query-agnostic methods on three of the four model-benchmark pairs and leads KVzip on all four, by 9.5 to 47.2 points. Notably, it scores a full-length context with negligible overhead relative to prefill.
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References · 30
- 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,944
- 2023Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spacescited by 4,718
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- 2024RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?cited by 1,346
- 2024Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Dualitycited by 1,336
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- 2021Linear Transformers Are Secretly Fast Weight Programmerscited by 502
- 2023Model Tells You What to Discard: Adaptive KV Cache Compression for LLMscited by 474
- 2023Scissorhands: Exploiting the Persistence of Importance Hypothesis for LLM KV Cache Compression at Test Timecited by 439
- 2024PyramidKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression based on Pyramidal Information Funnelingcited by 432
18 more
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- 2024Parallelizing Linear Transformers with the Delta Rule over Sequence Lengthcited by 396
- 2024DuoAttention: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference with Retrieval and Streaming Headscited by 288
- 2024Griffin: Mixing Gated Linear Recurrences with Local Attention for Efficient Language Modelscited by 242
- 2024Ada-KV: Optimizing KV Cache Eviction by Adaptive Budget Allocation for Efficient LLM Inferencecited by 235
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- 2024Samba: Simple Hybrid State Space Models for Efficient Unlimited Context Language Modelingcited by 174
- 2025MiniMax-01: Scaling Foundation Models with Lightning Attentioncited by 166
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- 2025KVzip: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Compression with Context Reconstructioncited by 95
- 2024A Simple and Effective L2 Norm-Based Strategy for KV Cache Compressioncited by 86
- 2024SCBench: A KV Cache-Centric Analysis of Long-Context Methodscited by 60
- 2025R-KV: Redundancy-aware KV Cache Compression for Reasoning Modelscited by 54
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- 2026On the Design of Qwen3.8-Next Architecture: Evaluation, Efficiency, and Training Stabilitycited by 35
- 2026TriAttention: Efficient Long Reasoning with Trigonometric KV Compressioncited by 21
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