Prefix Keys and Values Matter Late: RIPE Caching for Self-Speculative Decoding in Looped Language Models

A looped language model runs one block of layers $R$ times per token, so its key-value (KV) cache holds $R$ planes per recurrent layer, and self-speculative decoding (draft with a few loops, verify with all $R$) reads them all. We find that prefix keys and values matter late: at equal perturbation s