Meta-Soft: Leveraging Composable Meta-Tokens for Context-Preserving KV Cache Compression

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Luo, Wei, Huang, Yi, Ma, Songchen, Qu, Huanyu, Cai, Jiang, Xu, Mingkun
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Luo, Wei
Huang, Yi
Ma, Songchen
Qu, Huanyu
Cai, Jiang
Xu, Mingkun
author_facet Luo, Wei
Huang, Yi
Ma, Songchen
Qu, Huanyu
Cai, Jiang
Xu, Mingkun
contents The KV cache used in large language models has linearly growing time complexity, so LLMs face memory blow-up and reduced decoding efficiency when they process long contexts. Current KV Cache eviction has become an important research direction; however, existing methods based on fixed Soft Tokens (e.g., Judge Q) rely on a static parameter set as the query to evaluate the importance of KV pairs, so they cannot adapt dynamically to different input prompts, and they cannot precisely capture complex and changing task relevance. Also, evicted KV pairs are discarded permanently, so this causes irreversible information loss and context breaks. To address this problem, we propose Meta-Soft, a dynamic compression framework based on probe-driven context integration. Specifically, we build a meta-library with a learnable orthogonal basis matrix $\mathcal{L}$, and we use a selector network with Gumbel-Softmax to produce differentiable sparse combination weights, so we dynamically synthesize the most targeted $k$ Soft Tokens from the input prompt features. We append these Soft Tokens to the end of the input sequence to probe key information. We also introduce an attention-flow based integration mechanism, which redistributes the semantic information of removed tokens into retained tokens, and this keeps the dropped context information effectively. Experiments on multiple datasets show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art eviction methods and provides a new solution for KV Cache compression.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_22337
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Meta-Soft: Leveraging Composable Meta-Tokens for Context-Preserving KV Cache Compression
Luo, Wei
Huang, Yi
Ma, Songchen
Qu, Huanyu
Cai, Jiang
Xu, Mingkun
Artificial Intelligence
The KV cache used in large language models has linearly growing time complexity, so LLMs face memory blow-up and reduced decoding efficiency when they process long contexts. Current KV Cache eviction has become an important research direction; however, existing methods based on fixed Soft Tokens (e.g., Judge Q) rely on a static parameter set as the query to evaluate the importance of KV pairs, so they cannot adapt dynamically to different input prompts, and they cannot precisely capture complex and changing task relevance. Also, evicted KV pairs are discarded permanently, so this causes irreversible information loss and context breaks. To address this problem, we propose Meta-Soft, a dynamic compression framework based on probe-driven context integration. Specifically, we build a meta-library with a learnable orthogonal basis matrix $\mathcal{L}$, and we use a selector network with Gumbel-Softmax to produce differentiable sparse combination weights, so we dynamically synthesize the most targeted $k$ Soft Tokens from the input prompt features. We append these Soft Tokens to the end of the input sequence to probe key information. We also introduce an attention-flow based integration mechanism, which redistributes the semantic information of removed tokens into retained tokens, and this keeps the dropped context information effectively. Experiments on multiple datasets show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art eviction methods and provides a new solution for KV Cache compression.
title Meta-Soft: Leveraging Composable Meta-Tokens for Context-Preserving KV Cache Compression
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22337