StepCache: Step-Level Reuse with Lightweight Verification and Selective Patching for LLM Serving

We address LLM serving workloads where repeated requests share a common solution structure but differ in localized constraints, such as output schema, variable names, or numeric constants. Prior caching approaches typically reuse either full responses (semantic caching) or model-internal KV/prefix states, which are respectively brittle under partial changes or tightly coupled to specific backends. We present StepCache, a backend-agnostic step-level reuse layer that segments outputs into ordered steps, retrieves the best-matching cached request, verifies steps using lightweight task-aware checks, and regenerates only failing regions via selective patching. StepCache additionally supports s...

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