Error Certificates for KV-Cache Eviction via Randomized Design

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.21475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deterministic KV-cache eviction keeps the top-$k$ tokens under an importance score and deletes the rest. We prove that this design cannot know what it destroyed: evicted values can be altered so that everything the serving system retains is unchanged while the true attention-output error grows arbitrarily, so no serving-time estimator of that error is consistent. Randomized eviction restores identifiability. With a Poisson-sampled tail at known inclusion probabilities, one logit offset performs the H\'ajek correction inside the softmax, and a survey-sampling variance estimator over the retained set becomes a per-step error certificate with 0.97 empirical coverage at no accuracy cost. On real workloads we pre-registered seven claims and lost