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Cross-Model KV Cache Transfer in LLM Families: A Closed-Form Linear Mapping for Prefill Reuse

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TL;DR - This paper introduces cross-model KV cache transfer, using learned mappings to reuse prefill caches when switching between related LLMs. The approach can substantially reduce model-handoff latency while often preserving most downstream accuracy.

  • A closed-form, per-head ridge mapper predicts target-model KV states from selected source-model layers after removing RoPE from keys.
  • Calibration uses 500 FineWeb-Edu sequences of 1,024 tokens each.
  • Across six model pairs in three families, the linear method retained 73–98% of baseline accuracy on four pairs; an MLP improved failure cases by up to 37 percentage points on HellaSwag.
  • Mapping was 2.7–25× faster than recomputing prefill and remained stable across multi-turn handoffs.

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Cross-Model KV Cache Transfer in LLM Families: A Closed-Form Linear Mapping for Prefill Reuse

arXiv cs.LG Taekyung Heo, Rasoul Shafipour, Ritchie Zhao, Maximilian Golub, Mohammad Mahdi Kamani, Ritika Borkar, Makesh Tarun Chandran, Pantea Zardoshti, Bita Darvish Rouhani 2026-08-04 arXiv:2608.03893
Public signals Hugging Face upvotes 1
Providers: Hugging Face · Upvotes 1 OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · N/A X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-03 14:32:55.834288 UTC

TL;DR - This paper introduces cross-model KV cache transfer, using learned mappings to reuse prefill caches when switching between related LLMs. The approach can substantially reduce model-handoff latency while often preserving most downstream accuracy.

  • A closed-form, per-head ridge mapper predicts target-model KV states from selected source-model layers after removing RoPE from keys.
  • Calibration uses 500 FineWeb-Edu sequences of 1,024 tokens each.
  • Across six model pairs in three families, the linear method retained 73–98% of baseline accuracy on four pairs; an MLP improved failure cases by up to 37 percentage points on HellaSwag.
  • Mapping was 2.7–25× faster than recomputing prefill and remained stable across multi-turn handoffs.
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