Pixel Decodability Is Not a Compression Signal: Causally Evaluating Importance Proxies for Visual KV-Cache Eviction

Abstract

Vision-language models retain a substantial amount of pixel-decodable visual content in their visual key-value cache. We show, in our setting, that this retention is task-inert: across our preregistered tests, how much a unit retains never positively tracks whether the computation that answers the question causally relies on it. We measure retention with a learned pixel-inversion decoder and causal use with single-super-patch KV ablation, the teacher-forced drop in gold-answer log-probability, and relate the two within images under a preregistered, sign-calibrated, held-out design. Retention is decoupled from attention and, in a well-powered null, from causal utilization. Utilization is not inert to every proxy: attention weakly but significantly tracks it, the only signal we find that does and the design's positive control. We characterize pixel-decodable retention as an informational axis of the visual KV cache, orthogonal to the functional one. How much task-inert content a cache holds differs by architecture in our model pair: the encoder-free model retains 2.7 times more than the encoder-based one. The engineering consequence is a controlled negative result. At super-patch granularity, deconfounded pixel-decodable retention ranks KV eviction no better than random; at token granularity it acquires only a weak inverse-importance signal at larger budgets, dominated at every budget by attention magnitude. In our setting, pixel-decodable reconstructability is not a competitive KV-compression signal at any granularity we test.