Journal article
Lossless at What Length? Near-Lossless KV Cache Compression Is a Claim Indexed by Decode Exposure, Scoring Statistic and Budget Accounting, the Decode-Aware Line Has Answered the First Index Mostly on Final-Answer Accuracy, and Divergence From the Full Cache Is Not by Itself the Defect
Key-value cache compression is routinely reported as near-lossless at aggressive budgets: eviction, quantisation and merging methods keep a fifth or a tenth of the cache and match the full-cache score. A 2025-2026 line of work argues that the result was manufactured by evaluation, because the…