QKVShare: Quantized KV-Cache Handoff for Multi-Agent On-Device LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Honavar, Pratik, GVSL, Tejpratap
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Honavar, Pratik
GVSL, Tejpratap
author_facet Honavar, Pratik
GVSL, Tejpratap
contents Multi-agent LLM systems on edge devices need to hand off latent context efficiently, but the practical choices today are expensive re-prefill or full-precision KV transfer. We study QKVShare, a framework for quantized KV-cache handoff between agents that combines token-level mixed-precision allocation, a self-contained CacheCard representation, and a HuggingFace-compatible cache injection path. Our current results support a narrower but clearer story than the original draft: on 150 GSM8K problems with Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, adaptive quantization remains competitive under repeated handoff and shows its clearest gains against uniform quantization in deeper-hop, higher budget settings; for handoff latency, the QKVShare path reduces TTFT relative to full re prefill at every tested context, from 130.7 ms vs. 150.2 ms at nominal 1K context to 397.1 ms vs. 1029.7 ms at nominal 8K context;. Stage timing shows that post-injection generation, not card creation, dominates the current QKVShare latency path. These results position quantized KV handoff as a promising on-device systems direction while also highlighting the need for stronger controller ablations and apples-to-apples runtime comparisons.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_03884
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle QKVShare: Quantized KV-Cache Handoff for Multi-Agent On-Device LLMs
Honavar, Pratik
GVSL, Tejpratap
Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
Multi-agent LLM systems on edge devices need to hand off latent context efficiently, but the practical choices today are expensive re-prefill or full-precision KV transfer. We study QKVShare, a framework for quantized KV-cache handoff between agents that combines token-level mixed-precision allocation, a self-contained CacheCard representation, and a HuggingFace-compatible cache injection path. Our current results support a narrower but clearer story than the original draft: on 150 GSM8K problems with Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, adaptive quantization remains competitive under repeated handoff and shows its clearest gains against uniform quantization in deeper-hop, higher budget settings; for handoff latency, the QKVShare path reduces TTFT relative to full re prefill at every tested context, from 130.7 ms vs. 150.2 ms at nominal 1K context to 397.1 ms vs. 1029.7 ms at nominal 8K context;. Stage timing shows that post-injection generation, not card creation, dominates the current QKVShare latency path. These results position quantized KV handoff as a promising on-device systems direction while also highlighting the need for stronger controller ablations and apples-to-apples runtime comparisons.
title QKVShare: Quantized KV-Cache Handoff for Multi-Agent On-Device LLMs
topic Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03884