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

arXiv:2610.18014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-prefix KV cache reuse is a promising approach for improving inference efficiency in multi-agent systems as agents share the same context blocks. However, when agents have conflicting tasks, directly reusing non-prefix KV caches across agents can severely degrade model performance, causing up to a 90% drop. Existing remedies, including selective recomputation and offset-based calibration, recover a limited fraction of this loss. We argue that the problem lies not only in contaminated KV representations but also in the agent's difficulty interpreting reused context under its own instructions. To this end, we introduce LatentRemedy, which uses a few task-conditioned latent tokens to help the target agent leverage reused context without recomputing the shared block. Specifically, we use an MLP to map the last hidden state of the target prefix into a small number of latent tokens, which are placed after the reused KV block to interact with the shared context. To guide subsequent predictions toward the target task, we train the MLP through full-prefill distillation. Experiments show that LatentRemedy consistently outperforms existing reuse baselines on conflicting tasks while maintaining TTFT close to direct reuse as cache size grows. Code and data are available at https://github.com/chenzhwsysu57/kvreuse.

Abstract:Non-prefix KV cache reuse is a promising approach for improving inference efficiency in multi-agent systems as agents share the same context blocks. However, when agents have conflicting tasks, directly reusing non-prefix KV caches across agents can severely degrade model performance, causing up to a 90% drop. Existing remedies, including selective recomputation and offset-based calibration, recover a limited fraction of this loss. We argue that the problem lies not only in contaminated KV representations but also in the agent's difficulty interpreting reused context under its own instructions. To this end, we introduce LatentRemedy, which uses a few task-conditioned latent tokens to help the target agent leverage reused context without recomputing the shared block. Specifically, we use an MLP to map the last hidden state of the target prefix into a small number of latent tokens, which are placed after the reused KV block to interact with the shared context. To guide subsequent predictions toward the target task, we train the MLP through full-prefill distillation. Experiments show that LatentRemedy consistently outperforms existing reuse baselines on conflicting tasks while maintaining TTFT close to direct reuse as cache size grows. Code and data are available at this https URL.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.18014 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.18014v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.18014 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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

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