KVCMAS: Efficient KV cache Correction for Shared Context in Multi-Agent Systems
cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-09-28
Updated: 2026-10-06
Comments: 29 pages, 13 figures, 15 tables
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The gist: Prompt-specialized multi-agent systems enable multiple agents to share a model while performing complementary roles to solve complex tasks.
Terminology
Abstract
Prompt-specialized multi-agent systems enable multiple agents to share a model while performing complementary roles to solve complex tasks. However, agent-specific prefixes change the KV cache generated for the same shared context, causing each agent to repeatedly prefill the growing context and construct a separate cache with high computation and memory overhead. Selective recomputation reduces this redundancy but still retains substantial model execution, while existing delta correction methods either support only recurring context relations or maintain memory-intensive online correction states for dynamically changing context. For first seen shared context, these methods also construct a reference cache outside the agent workflow, and an approximate correction at the first agent affects the outputs passed to subsequent agents. We present KVCMAS, an online KV cache correction framework that represents cross-agent cache deviations using compact low-rank states and seamlessly chains corrections along the agent workflow without an additional reference prefill. This design supports dynamically changing shared context while preserving an exact first-agent cache. Across multiple language and vision-language workloads, KVCMAS matches or improves the accuracy of prior KV cache sharing methods while achieving the lowest TTFT under highly concurrent serving. Under controlled serving traces, it provides a 2.0x TTFT speedup over inference without KV cache sharing and reduces peak GPU memory by up to 3.7x relative to a prior KV cache correction method. These results establish KVCMAS as an accurate and scalable KV cache sharing approach for prompt-specialized multi-agent serving.
Sources
- TokenDance: Scaling Multi-Agent LLM Serving via Collective KV Cache Sharing
- Cache-to-Cache: Direct Semantic Communication Between Large Language Models
- RelayCaching: Accelerating LLM Collaboration via Decoding KV Cache Reuse
- Cross-Model KV Cache Transfer in LLM Families: A Closed-Form Linear Mapping for Prefill Reuse
- Characterizing How Complex Agentic AI Systems Handle General Tasks: A Trace-Based Simulation Study
- GraphFlow: A Graph-Based Workflow Management for Efficient LLM-Agent Serving
- MoRSE: Task-Oriented Multi-Agent System with Mixture of Role-Subtask Experts
- Kamera: Unified Position-Invariant Multimodal KV Cache for Training-Free Reuse
- KVFlow: Efficient Prefix Caching for Accelerating LLM-Based Multi-Agent Workflows
- MetaGen: Self-Evolving Roles and Topologies for Multi-Agent LLM Reasoning
- KVShare: An LLM Service System with Efficient and Effective Multi-Tenant KV Cache Reuse
- KVLink: Accelerating Large Language Models via Efficient KV Cache Reuse
- KVCOMM: Online Cross-context KV-cache Communication for Efficient LLM-based Multi-agent Systems
- TraceLab: Characterizing Coding Agent Workloads for LLM Serving
- MultiAgentBench: Evaluating the Collaboration and Competition of LLM agents
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