Close Enough is Nowhere Near: Fidelity-Consumability Decoupling in KV Caches
Multi-agent LLM systems communicate in text, which is lossy and wasteful: the sender throws away the reading it already did. A growing literature instead transmits the KV cache, the natural carrier of that reading. We study the most appealing form of the idea: both models stay frozen and the sender's cache is substituted for the reader's with nothing trained. It does not work, and the obstruction belongs to the reader. A frozen transformer reads only caches close to the one it would have written itself, a region we call its tolerable set. We show that geometric similarity to that cache does not predict whether the reader can use it, and the failure is not gradual, so a more faithful subst...
| Authors | Adam Deng, Shicheng Liu, Yada Zhu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 16 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.