KV Admission: Learning What to Write for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Abstract

Long-context LLM inference is bottlenecked by the quadratic attention complexity and linear Key-Value (KV) cache growth. Prior approaches mitigate this via post-hoc selection or eviction but overlook the root inefficiency: indiscriminate token admission. In this paper, we formalize KV management as a causal system of three primitives: KV Admission, Selection, and Eviction. We instantiate KV Admission via Write-Gated KV (WG-KV), a lightweight mechanism that learns to predict token utility before cache entry. By filtering out redundant states early to maintain a compact global cache alongside a sliding local cache, WG-KV significantly reduces memory usage and accelerates both prefill and decode phases. Our results demonstrate that learning what to write is a principled and practical recipe for efficient long-context inference. Code is available at https://github.com/EMCLab-Sinica/WG-KV.

EMNLP 2026