Squeezing the Cache, Preserving the Truth: Monotonic Equipotential Allocation with Geodesia-KV

arXiv:2608.23599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current assessment of KV-cache compression performance confuses resident bits with read bandwidth and is affected by the artifacts of chunked teacher-forcing. We present Geodesia-KV, a family of training-free KV cache policies based on monotonic block-wise precision allocation, exact rate-distortion residuals, and query-sparse reading, enabling proper hardware-ready compression. With proper separation of resident and read bits and causal evaluation, we show that Geodesia-KV significantly outperforms other approaches. Specifically, on WikiText-2 with 16k context, the 5-bit operating point of Geodesia-KV results in lower perplexity at lower bitrate than KIVI-4 on Qwen. In addition, our compressed-Quest version delivers improved perplexity and reduces resident (9.83 vs 16.25 bits/value) and read rates (1.95 vs 2.32 bits/value) over baseline sparse methods on PG-19. As Geodesia-KV is implemented as native GeodesiaKVCacheManager plug-in of vLLM, Geodesia-KV fully removes the need for dense cache residency via monotonic bit demotion. With the full consumer hardware evaluation, Geodesia-KV leads to 1M-token context generation on a single 16 GiB GPU with up to 71.7% peak VRAM savings on all leading architectures (Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek).