You Need an Encoder for Native Position-Independent Caching

Shiju Zhao, Junhao Hu, Jiaqi Zheng, Guihai Chen

You Need an Encoder for Native Position-Independent Caching: 0 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #52 of 53 papers on 2026-02-04. Day-by-day upvote history.

The Key-Value (KV) cache of Large Language Models (LLMs) is prefix-based, making it highly inefficient for processing contexts retrieved in arbitrary order. Position-Independent Caching (PIC) has been proposed to enable KV reuse without positional constraints; however, existing approaches often incur substantial accuracy degradation, limiting their practical adoption. To address this issue, we propose native PIC by reintroducing the encoder to prevalent decoder-only LLMs and explicitly training it to support PIC. We further develop COMB, a PIC-aware caching system that integrates seamlessly with existing inference frameworks. Experimental results show that COMB reduces Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) by 51-94% and increases throughput by 3times with comparable accuracy. Furthermore, the quality improvement when using DeepSeek-V2-Lite-Chat demonstrates the applicability of COMB to other types of decoder-only LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/shijuzhao/Comb.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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