KV-Fold: One-Step KV-Cache Recurrence for Long-Context Inference

TL;DR

KV-Fold is a training-free inference protocol enabling long-context processing in transformers by treating the KV cache as a recurrent accumulator, achieving stable, exact long-distance retrieval without retraining.

Contribution

It introduces KV-Fold, a simple, stable, training-free recurrence method for long-context inference that reuses the KV cache across chunks without model modification or retraining.

Findings

Achieves 100% exact-match retrieval on long contexts up to 128K tokens.

Maintains stability and accuracy across different chunk sizes and model families.

Operates within a 40GB GPU memory limit, enabling practical long-context inference.

Abstract

We introduce KV-Fold, a simple, training-free long-context inference protocol that treats the key-value (KV) cache as the accumulator in a left fold over sequence chunks. At each step, the model processes the next chunk conditioned on the accumulated cache, appends the newly produced keys and values, and passes the enlarged cache forward; the same one-step update is applied repeatedly, analogous to foldl in functional programming. Building on the KV cache concatenation primitive introduced for latent multi-agent communication, we repurpose it as a chunk-to-chunk recurrence for long-context inference. When processing chunk t, the model attends to the KV cache carried from earlier chunks as a prefix, reusing its internal state across segments without modifying or retraining the model. Despite its simplicity, the induced recurrence is stable: per-step drift rises briefly and then saturates into a flat plateau that persists across deep chains. This plateau is insensitive to a 10,000x change in numerical precision, robust across chunk sizes, and consistent across model families. At the task level, KV-Fold preserves exact information over long distances. On a needle-in-a-haystack benchmark, it achieves 100% exact-match retrieval across 152 trials spanning contexts from 16K to 128K tokens and chain depths up to 511 on Llama-3.1-8B, while remaining within the memory limits of a single 40GB GPU. Compared to streaming methods, which trade fidelity for bounded memory, KV-Fold maintains long-range retrieval while operating as a sequence of tractable forward passes. Overall, our results show that frozen pretrained transformers already support a stable form of KV-cache recurrence, providing a practical route to long-context inference without architectural changes or training.