# KV-Cache Repair Budget Allocation

Non-prefix KV-cache reuse encodes retrieved chunks separately and concatenates their caches, losing 19% to 100% of context-dependent questions that full prefill answers, with same-kind distractor chunks adding to the loss. Comparing whether a small repair budget should go to distractors or to the answer-bearing chunk, the study finds that restoring all distractors costs nearly a full prefill, while recomputing the answer-bearing chunk beats token-level selectors at a 5% budget in all nine open-domain QA and API-documentation settings.

Non-prefix KV-cache reuse encodes retrieved chunks separately and concatenates their caches, losing 19% to 100% of context-dependent questions that full prefill answers, with same-kind distractor chunks adding to the loss. Comparing whether a small repair budget should go to distractors or to the answer-bearing chunk, the study finds that restoring all distractors costs nearly a full prefill, while recomputing the answer-bearing chunk beats token-level selectors at a 5% budget in all nine open-domain QA and API-documentation settings.