How Query Visibility Changes KV-Cache Compression Rankings: A Matched-Budget Audit

arXiv:2607.11942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: KV-cache compression methods are predominantly evaluated with the query appended to the context before compression -- a query-aware protocol. Yet the economic case for a compressed KV cache is reuse: compress a document once, answer many future questions against it. In that deployment, compression must happen query-agnostic -- before any question is seen. We present a matched-budget audit of six published compression methods against three trivial b...