arXiv Machine Learning By Adam Deng, Shicheng Liu, Yada Zhu

Augment the Cache, Replace the Activation: A 2x2 Study of Internal-State Sharing

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The paper investigates how to efficiently share internal states between agents built from frozen language models. It proposes a shared pool approach where each agent publishes its internal state once, allowing peers to read it via a single mechanism, thereby avoiding the need for a dedicated transfer bridge for every agent pair. The study finds that augmenting the key‑value cache and replacing activations—rather than swapping them—yields better accuracy with minimal training, and that a single adapter can generalize across multiple publishers when their internal states are similar to the receiver’s.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

Close Enough is Nowhere Near: Fidelity-Consumability Decoupling in KV Caches

The paper investigates whether a frozen transformer can use another model’s KV cache as a substitute for its own, finding that this approach fails because the reader only accepts caches within a narrow tolerable set. Experimental results show that none of eight substitution methods improve performance over a baseline, while a different strategy—adding the sender’s cache as extra context and only adapting queries—does outperform the baseline. The authors conclude that pursuing faithful cache substitution is misguided and that augmenting the reader’s own cache is the more promising direction.

By Adam Deng, Shicheng Liu, Yada Zhu
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