# SparPR: Runtime KV-Cache Recovery for Resource-Constrained LLM Inference on Consumer Hardware

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18140 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18140/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in KV cache optimization, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 9 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [H2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14048/) (2023)
- [FlexGen: High-Throughput Generative Inference of Large Language Models with a Single GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06865/) (2023)
- [Quest: Query-Aware Sparsity for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10774/) (2024)
- [ShadowKV: KV Cache in Shadows for High-Throughput Long-Context LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21465/) (2024)
- [ProphetKV: User-Query-Driven Selective Recomputation for Efficient KV Cache Reuse in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02579/) (2026)
- [Breaking the Boundaries of Long-Context LLM Inference: Adaptive KV Management on a Single Commodity GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20187/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Running large language models (LLMs) on consumer hardware is bottlenecked by the key-value (KV) cache, which grows with every decoded token and quickly exhausts the memory and bandwidth of a single consumer GPU. We present SparPR (Sparse Partial Recomputation), a runtime KV-cache recovery mechanism that does not modify model weights and requires no offline training. SparPR couples three online decisions: Query-Aware key-block selection scores historical blocks against the current query; dynamic budget control estimates per-block copy and recompute costs to decide how many blocks to retain; and on-demand local recomputation with cost-aware fallback merges retained blocks into continuous spans and switches between sparse recomputation and full recovery according to a runtime cost comparison. Implemented on FlexGen/FlexLLMGen, SparPR is evaluated on a single consumer laptop (RTX 3070 Ti 8GB, Ryzen 9 6900HX, 16GB RAM). It cuts end-to-end latency by 31%, 52%, and 63% at 1k, 2k, and 4k prompt tokens respectively, with 1.4x-2.7x higher throughput, and completes an 8k-token workload in 44 minutes where the FlexGen baseline times out. Under a fixed cache budget, SparPR retains a Needle Accuracy that stays well above StreamingLLM and H2O at every keep ratio, and ablation studies confirm that the three mechanisms act jointly.
