Memory as a cache: Exact context reuse and deletion by construction

Shengyao Wang, Jiang Liu

The KV cache of a transformer entangles every token's representation with its entire prefix: a passage encoded once cannot be reused under a different prefix or removed without recomputing everything after it, so exact cache reuse is limited to shared prefixes. We present SMem, an architecture whose context representation is a cache by construction. A block-local encoder maps each block to memory rows independently of other blocks, and a reader conditions generation on their union through cross-attention. For every parameter setting, memory composes exactly at fixed block indices, deleting a block is an exact $O(b)$ update for $b$-token blocks, and the memory state is independent of the edit path. At $4\times$ the training context, under the shared recipe, SMem retrieves planted needles beyond any trained-length window (exact match 0.14-0.28 at distances of 31 and 63 blocks), where learned-position, RoPE, and Block-Attention-style transformers all score at most 0.02. A fully cached context is served by computing one block alone at a near-constant 3.1-6.2 ms, whereas cold prefill grows with context; batched decode stores 34-38% fewer KV rows and runs 1.4-1.7$\times$ faster when…