CALFA-KV: Joint Calibration and Fisher-Guided Anchors for 1-Bit KV Cache Compression

Xiancai Tian, Leichao Zhang, Shenhui Zhang, Yi Shan, Hailong Li +3

1-bit key-value (KV) cache compression can combine quantizer calibration with selective high-precision storage to reduce reconstruction error. We propose Calibration and Fisher-guided Anchors for KV cache compression (CALFA-KV). Offline, we jointly fit a key center, radial normalization parameters, and K/V vector codebooks to match the frozen model's projected attention output. We also estimate channel-wise Fisher-type sensitivities from squared gradients of a reference next-token cross-entropy loss. Online, we use these sensitivities to weight the squared reconstruction errors of each KV state. Here, a KV state is one token's key-value pair within one layer and KV head. We retain the highest-scoring states at high precision under a per-layer, per-KV-head budget. Under exact restoration, we bound the excess risk of score-based anchor selection relative to the optimum at the same anchor budget, where risk is the conditional mean square of the first-order loss change. With a budget of 56 additional FP16 anchors per layer and KV head, CALFA-KV (d8b8) outperforms all evaluated nominal 1-bit baselines on the mean score across seven benchmarks for each of the three models. At the same…