The disclosed embodiments provide a system for processing scoring requests. During operation, the system matches an identifier for an entity in a scoring request to a cache entry in a score cache. Next, the system retrieves, from the cache entry, a previous value of a score generated by a machine learning model from previous values of features for the entity and a first encoded representation of the previous values of a subset of the features with greater than a threshold effect on the score. The system then compares the first encoded representation with a second encoded representation of the most recent values of the subset of the features for the entity. When the comparison indicates that the most recent values match the previous values, the system outputs the previous value of the score for the entity in a response to the scoring request.