CacheLink: Functional KV Transport for Zero-Prefill Cross-Model Context Handoff
KV caches make long-context serving efficient by reusing past computation, but model switching breaks this reuse and forces the receiver to prefill the context again. We study \emph{zero-prefill cross-model context handoff}: translating a sender cache into a receiver-compatible state so that the receiver can continue directly without prefilling same context. Existing affine transport methods show that receiver KV states can be substantially reconstructed from sender caches. However, through extensive analyses, we find that reconstruction fidelity is a poor proxy for receiver utility. Similar K/V reconstruction errors can lead to substantially different attention patterns, predictive distr...
| Authors | Haomiao Qiu, Yining Tang, Zijia Song et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 11 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 October 2026 |
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