Ablation, Statistical Inference, and Validation for KV-Cache Compression

Abstract

This study systematically compares Turbo-Quant and SpectralQuant KV-cache compression, evaluating non-dominated schemes, including WHT rotation with Beta Lloyd-Max and QJL, through a statistical validation methodology that separates systematic codec differences from implementation variance. Key findings reveal that while eigenbasis-based methods fail on heavy-tailed data due to covariance instability, they excel in structured regimes, with the effective semantic dimension ($d_{eff}$) adapting to calibration budgets rather than true data rank. (this is an abstract of the abstract thank you )