AlignPred: Error-Controlled KV Cache Compression via Alignment and Predictive Coding

Abstract

Long-running agents retain KV caches across turns and sessions for hours or days. Compressing these persistent caches requires reducing storage while controlling reconstruction error. We present AlignPred, a codec that combines local alignment with predictive coding under a configurable KV reconstruction-error budget. Local orthogonal transforms align related heads or layers into a common coordinate frame, allowing AlignPred to combine token-wise prediction with same-token prediction across heads or layers. Residuals are quantized on an error-bounded lattice and entropy-coded, without learned predictors, encoder-side mode search, or large joint transforms. Across three attention mechanisms, AlignPred requires less storage than the evaluated baselines at comparable measured reconstruction error. Against the evaluated CPU codec implementations, it decodes at least 1.6 times faster while matching or improving encode time. AlignPred achieves near-native task scores at substantially compressed operating points on LongBench-Pro at 128K context. AlignPred's SGLang HiCache integration reduces persistent target-KV storage by 42-72% relative to native HiCache, with comparable latency.