SPECTRA: Pushing the KV Cache Beyond the 2-Bit Cliff via Spectral Transform Coding

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly read long inputs in the agentic era, from whole documents and codebases to conversations across many turns. Their inference memory is then dominated by the key-value (KV) cache, the stored attention keys and values of every token the model has read and generated. Because the cache grows with context length and is re-read in full at every generated token, a longer context means more GPU memory. To reduce this cost, most existing methods compress the KV cache by lowering every stored value to the same low precision, a technique known as quantization. They can push this to nearly two bits per value, but rarely further, because quality drops sharply at this 2-bit cliff: four levels are too few for the cache's outlier-heavy values, where a few large entries consume the levels and collapse the rest into noise. A natural remedy is to spend more bits on the channels (feature dimensions) that matter and fewer on the rest, but the raw cache offers no handle: its channels are strongly correlated, so none stands out as more important. Our analysis shows that this handle appears once the cache is rotated into a coordinate system computed from its own statistics, removing these correlations. There, a small fraction of channels carries almost all the information, and spending the budget on those few is far more accurate than spreading it evenly. Guided by this analysis, we develop SPECTRA, a training-free, drop-in codec that re-encodes the cache into this coordinate system and concentrates the bit budget on the channels that carry the signal. On Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen2.5-7B over long-context benchmarks, SPECTRA is near-lossless at 4x compression, competitive at 8x where uniform quantization has collapsed, and reaches up to 12x, pushing usable compression past the 2-bit cliff so the same GPU holds longer contexts and larger batches.

Field Aware Agent Skill Retrieval

As lifelong learning agents accumulate lifelong growing skill banks, retrieving the correct skill becomes an increasingly important bottleneck. Most current skill retrieval methods treat each skill as one flat document by concatenating fields such as the name, description, and body. However, skills are naturally structured, multi-field objects, where each field provides different information about when and how the skill should be used. In this work, we study whether preserving this structure improves skill retrieval. We represent each skill as its separate components, and compute sparse and dense similarities for each field independently, exposing a naturally tensorized, field-aware representation of the skill bank. We then combine these field-level scores either with uniform weights or with a small learned MLP. Across two different skill retrieval benchmarks, SkillRet and SRA-Bench, we find that keeping fields separate improves hybrid retrieval, and learning over the field-level scores gives the strongest and most consistent results. Our field-aware MLP reaches $77.95$ Recall@10 on SkillRet and $83.78$ Recall@10 on SRA-Bench, outperforming the corresponding concatenated learned baselines. We also find that the advantage grows as the skill bank becomes larger, suggesting that field-aware skill retrieval becomes especially useful in the setting where retrieval is most difficult. Our results show that skill representation itself matters, and that simply preserving the structure already present in skill files can substantially improve retrieval.

Towards Resilient and Autonomous Networks: A BlueSky Vision on AI-Native 6G

The proliferation of emerging applications, such as autonomous driving and immersive experiences, demands cellular networks that are not only faster, but fundamentally more resilient and autonomous. This paper presents a BlueSky vision on how Artificial Intelligence will be natively integrated into 6G, shifting the paradigm from \underline{Network for AI} to \underline{AI for Network}. We envision that, unlike 5G's reliance on scattered, ad-hoc models each trained for a single task, native AI in the 6G era will be anchored by a foundation model and and orchestrated via collaborative multi-agent systems, framing network management as a unified, multi-modal, multi-task optimization problem. Built on this vision, we outline two transformative directions. The first focuses on developing a 6G foundation model as a unified backbone, with task-specific knowledge distilled into compact models suited for diverse edge deployments. The second advances multi-agent systems designed to autonomously diagnose, maintain, and recover networks with minimal human intervention. These directions chart a roadmap for 6G to evolve into an intelligent, self-sustaining communication infrastructure.