ProtoKV: Long-context Knowledges Are Already Well-Organized Before Your Query

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) face fundamental challenges in processing long text sequences due to the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms. Key-Value (KV) cache retention strategies mitigate this issue by selectively preserving salient KV pairs for autoregressive generation. However, existing methods fail to adequately and efficiently preserve the semantic integrity of the compressed representations. In this paper, we discover a prevalent phenomenon in LLM: within the key embedding space, while most tokens exhibit similarity with their contextual neighbors (we term position-determined tokens), a small subset of special tokens serving as semantic anchors consistently show local deviation property and form one or several clusters (we term semantic-anchored tokens). Motivated by this observation, we propose ProtoKV that separately processes these two token categories for KV cache compression. Within this framework, we first construct semantic prototypes based on the inherent characteristics of the two token categories, and subsequently form clusters of semantically similar tokens as basic compression units. This approach preserves semantic integrity with high computational efficiency. Experiments on LongBench demonstrate that ProtoKV achieves 2.11% higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods under matched memory constraints. Our code can be available in https://github.com/yyy0959/ProtoKV .