ByteDance researchers identify cause of inconsistent long-context retrieval in DeepSeek models

Researchers from ByteDance’s Seed team have identified a mechanism behind inconsistent long-context retrieval in DeepSeek models. Their study found that chunked KV-cache compression makes retrieval accuracy sensitive to where information falls within a compression window, producing differences of up to 40 percentage points across positions. The technique reduces memory and attention costs by compressing groups of consecutive tokens into fewer cache entries.