RestoreKV: Recovering Full-Cache Behavior Under Aggressive Query-Agnostic KV Cache Eviction

Query-agnostic KV cache eviction compresses a context once and reuses the resulting cache for arbitrary future queries, but performance can collapse under tight budgets. Existing methods primarily improve which original KV pairs are retained. We introduce RestoreKV, which complements this selection-based formulation with learned restoration under the same total KV budget. The restore generator is trained to complement retained original KV states through predictions from their combined cache, rather than to replace the entire context. After context prefill, a few restore tokens attend to the full KV cache in a single LoRA-adapted pass, generating a compact, context-conditioned restore cache. The base importance scorer and eviction rule remain unchanged, and the adapters are disabled for all subsequent queries and decoding. RestoreKV is trained through parameter-efficient self-distillation from the frozen full-cache model, optimizing only 0.4% of the parameters and requiring no task-specific tuning. Across four backbones and four long-context benchmarks, RestoreKV substantially reduces compression-induced degradation. On Qwen3-4B, it improves 59 of 60 paired, budget-matched settings across five base eviction methods; at a 5% budget, it raises KVzip from 38.2 to 73.2 on RULER-4K. On Qwen3-8B, applying RestoreKV to KVzip+ reaches 86.4 RULER accuracy at 16× compression on the KVPress Benchmark, while adding at most 0.5% one-time cache construction overhead in a 32K-context evaluation.