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ContrastKV: Robust KV Cache Eviction via Contrastive Signal Fusion for Multi-Query Generalization

Xingchi Chen, Peiyuan Zong, Ziqiang Gao, Qing Li, Yong Jiang, Fa Zhu, Hui Li

2026Year

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant memory and latency overheads during inference due to KV cache grows with the context length. This issue is especially pronouced in Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) settings that require support for multiple downstream queries. Query-aware eviction methods do not generalize across queries, while existing query-agnostic approaches rely on a single proxy query, leading to fragile eviction decisions under high eviction ratios. We propose ContrastKV, a robust query-agnostic KV cache eviction algorithm for multi-query generalization. ContrastKV introduces a contrastive signal fusion mechanism that jointly exploits complementary semantic and structural signals. By contrasting semantic consistency with structural robustness, the method constructs a more reliable eviction criterion that alleviates the blind spots of single-query proxies. The framework integrates efficient signal generation, parallel importance scoring, and multi-level fusion across heads and layers. Experiments show that ContrastKV outperforms state-of-the-art methods, retaining up to 92% accuracy with only 20% of the KV cache budget, while reducing decoding latency by approximately 50% and significantly lowering GPU memory usage.

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