EarlySelectKV: Anticipatory KV Selection via Cross-Layer Query Proxies

Abstract

Query-conditioned sparse KV selection reduces long-context inference cost by attending to a subset of historical KV entries at each decoding step. Existing selectors must wait for the target-layer query before scoring candidates and generating indices, placing routing on the immediate pre-attention path. We introduce EarlySelectKV, a training-free transformation that uses proxy queries from earlier hidden states to precompute selected KV indices while retaining the real target-layer query for final attention. Tests with RocketKV, Quest, and Loki show no consistent pattern of quality degradation across the evaluated settings. In the primary RocketKV evaluation, ES-RocketKV differs by +0.018 points on LongBench, approximately -0.01 points on RULER, and +0.25 percentage points on representative NIAH/Passkey settings. In a TensorRT-LLM deployment with CPU-offloaded routing, ES-RocketKV improves end-to-end output throughput by up to 12.4% and reduces GPU-resident memory by 11.1% of the combined KV/K-summary pool. This makes routing timing an explicit optimization target alongside KV subset selection in sparse long-context decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/sea-with-sakura/EarlySelectKV.