ForkKV: Scaling Multi-LoRA Agent Serving via Copy-on-Write Disaggregated KV Cache

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wang, Shao, Ren, Rui, Gui, Lin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Wang, Shao
Ren, Rui
Gui, Lin
author_facet Wang, Shao
Ren, Rui
Gui, Lin
contents The serving paradigm of large language models (LLMs) is rapidly shifting towards complex multi-agent workflows where specialized agents collaborate over massive shared contexts. While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables the efficient co-hosting of these specialized agents on a single base model, it introduces a critical memory footprint bottleneck during serving. Specifically, unique LoRA activations cause Key-Value (KV) cache divergence across agents, rendering traditional prefix caching ineffective for shared contexts. This forces redundant KV cache maintenance, rapidly saturating GPU capacity and degrading throughput. To address this challenge, we introduce ForkKV, a serving system for multi-LoRA agent workflows centered around a novel memory management paradigm in OS: fork with copy-on-write (CoW). By exploiting the structural properties of LoRA, ForkKV physically decouples the KV cache into a massive shared component (analogous to the parent process's memory pages) and lightweight agent-specific components (the child process's pages). To support this mechanism, we propose a DualRadixTree architecture that allows newly forked agents to inherit the massive shared cache and apply CoW semantics for their lightweight unique cache. Furthermore, to guarantee efficient execution, we design ResidualAttention, a specialized kernel that reconstructs the disaggregated KV cache directly within on-chip SRAM. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse language models and practical datasets of different tasks demonstrate that ForkKV achieves up to 3.0x the throughput of state-of-the-art multi-LoRA serving systems with a negligible impact on generation quality.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06370
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ForkKV: Scaling Multi-LoRA Agent Serving via Copy-on-Write Disaggregated KV Cache
Wang, Shao
Ren, Rui
Gui, Lin
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
The serving paradigm of large language models (LLMs) is rapidly shifting towards complex multi-agent workflows where specialized agents collaborate over massive shared contexts. While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables the efficient co-hosting of these specialized agents on a single base model, it introduces a critical memory footprint bottleneck during serving. Specifically, unique LoRA activations cause Key-Value (KV) cache divergence across agents, rendering traditional prefix caching ineffective for shared contexts. This forces redundant KV cache maintenance, rapidly saturating GPU capacity and degrading throughput. To address this challenge, we introduce ForkKV, a serving system for multi-LoRA agent workflows centered around a novel memory management paradigm in OS: fork with copy-on-write (CoW). By exploiting the structural properties of LoRA, ForkKV physically decouples the KV cache into a massive shared component (analogous to the parent process's memory pages) and lightweight agent-specific components (the child process's pages). To support this mechanism, we propose a DualRadixTree architecture that allows newly forked agents to inherit the massive shared cache and apply CoW semantics for their lightweight unique cache. Furthermore, to guarantee efficient execution, we design ResidualAttention, a specialized kernel that reconstructs the disaggregated KV cache directly within on-chip SRAM. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse language models and practical datasets of different tasks demonstrate that ForkKV achieves up to 3.0x the throughput of state-of-the-art multi-LoRA serving systems with a negligible impact on generation quality.
title ForkKV: Scaling Multi-LoRA Agent Serving via Copy-on-Write Disaggregated KV Cache
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06370