{"paper":{"title":"Protection Is (Nearly) All You Need: Structural Protection Dominates Scoring in Globally Capped KV Eviction","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.CL","cs.CR","cs.PF"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Gabriel Garcia","submitted_at":"2026-05-18T08:41:34Z","abstract_excerpt":"We study KV cache eviction under a shared globally capped decode-time harness. Seven policies (LRU, H2O, SnapKV, StreamingLLM, Ada-KV, QUEST, Random) share a prompt-boundary vulnerability: without structural protection, they collapse to near-zero quality on six pure-transformer models (F1$\\leq$0.064). Reserving 10\\% of cache at each boundary recovers 69--90\\% of the $C{=}2{,}048$ reference-ceiling quality on seven LongBench models at $C{=}256$ (13\\% retention); a ten-model panel spans 68--98\\%. An attention-mass pilot (Qwen2.5-3B, $N{=}30$) suggests why: the position-0 sink holds ${\\sim}75\\%$ "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.18053","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.18053/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[{"name":"claim_evidence","ran_at":"2026-05-19T23:41:59.282858Z","status":"completed","version":"1.0.0","findings_count":0},{"name":"ai_meta_artifact","ran_at":"2026-05-19T23:33:35.482714Z","status":"skipped","version":"1.0.0","findings_count":0}],"snapshot_sha256":"02ec41e1c1ec39d2f371761abbd5e3cd629378892341518f0e09683848f9b8b0"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}