arXiv Computation and Language

Cache Engineering for Agents

The paper introduces cache engineering for large language model agents, enabling direct control over the active key-value cache without altering the trajectory or triggering costly re-prefilling. It defines cache operations such as drop and repos, formalizes their effects, and addresses the challenge of history-dependent cache states. The authors co-design a stateless AKV serving engine that manages stateful cache reuse, eviction, and restoration, achieving significant performance and cost improvements over traditional summarization methods.

arXiv AI
Jul 24

Workload-Aware Caching for Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2607. 20495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent systems decompose complex tasks into directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of specialized agent executions, creating natural opportunities for caching intermediate results across queries.

By Anas Mohamed, Kaizan Haque, Azal Ahmad Khan, Chetan Sharma, Shuwen Ge, Ali Anwar
arXiv AI
Oct 15

LatentRemedy: Efficient Remedy For Non-Prefix KV Cache Reuse in Multi-Agent Systems

LatentRemedy is a method designed to improve inference efficiency in multi‑agent systems that share non‑prefix KV caches. By inserting a small number of task‑conditioned latent tokens generated via an MLP, the target agent can better interpret reused context without recomputing the shared block. Experiments demonstrate that LatentRemedy consistently outperforms existing reuse baselines on conflicting tasks while keeping TTFT close to direct reuse as cache size grows.

By Zhiwei Chen, Zhongtao Rao, Waikit Xiu, Yuxiang Zhang, Shuting Cui, Jian Chen, Tianxiang Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

TOPAS: Workflow-Aware Prefix-State Scheduling for Multi-Agent LLM Serving

TOPAS is a Task‑Oriented Prefix‑Aware Scheduler designed for multi‑agent large language model serving. It jointly decides which agent prefixes to retain in a shared key‑value cache and which requests to schedule, balancing the reduction of each task’s longest remaining service path against the benefit of downstream prefix reuse while accounting for movement and preemption costs. Experiments on synthetic DAGs and MetaGPT software‑development workflows show that TOPAS can reduce mean and p99 job completion times by up to 39.8%/49.4% and 22.0%/26.6% respectively compared to the best baselines.

By Hongqiu Ni, Han Tian, Chi Zhang, Guopeng Li, Haisheng Tan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Same Request, Different Answer: Quantization Amplifies Cache-Induced Divergence in LLM Serving

The paper investigates how prefix caching, a default optimization in open‑source LLM serving stacks, affects reproducibility when combined with weight quantization. Experiments on an eighty‑episode multi‑turn agentic tool‑use workload show that enabling the cache causes the agent’s trajectory to change in 36.2 % of episodes at 16‑bit precision and 75.0 % at 4‑bit precision, while disabling the cache yields perfectly reproducible runs. The study identifies specific cache‑related settings that drive run‑to‑run divergence and demonstrates that cached serving is deterministic only when the cache state is preserved, which is not the case in typical deployments.

By Aditi Patodiya
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

CacheReforge: Bounded Recovery for Stale KV Caches under Evolving Adapters

CacheReforge is a method for recovering stale key‑value (KV) caches in large language models when lightweight adapters evolve. It represents stale caches as layer‑wise mixed‑version objects and uses adapter anchors, sensitivity calibration, drift accumulation, and restart boundaries to decide between direct reuse, bounded recomputation, or full suffix recovery. Experiments on Qwen2.5 models with continual LoRA updates show a 92.4% reduction in mean KL divergence while only recomputing 5.44% of layers and cutting cache‑maintenance time by 93.2% compared to full prefill.

By Yuhang Cao, Yanzhou Mu, Chunrong Fang, Zhenyu Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 28

ActKV: Efficient LLM Agents through Action-Guided KV Cache Management

ActKV is a new KV cache compression framework designed for agentic large language model (LLM) inference. It prioritizes cache entries that contribute to action generation, using action-oriented eviction, confidence-driven budget allocation, and page-aware compression to reduce memory usage while preserving accuracy. In long-trace tasks, ActKV retains 98.53% of FullKV’s accuracy using only 25.98% of its peak memory and boosts token and task throughput by 3.97× and 3.58×, respectively.

By Zihan Wang, Cheng Tang, Lei Gong, Chao Wang, Wenqi Lou, Teng Wang, Xuehai Zhou