An experimental study of KV cache reuse strategies in chunk-level caching systems

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20218v1
• Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:20:50 GMT
• Title: An experimental study of KV cache reuse strategies in chunk-level caching systems
• Abstract summary: Retrieval-augmented generation improves large language models' accuracy by adding relevant retrieved text to the prompt.<n>Chunk level caching (CLC) accelerates inference by precomputing KV caches for these retrieved chunks and reusing them.<n>We show that existing CLC approaches have fundamental limitations that limit their accuracy or their applicability.<n>We propose a new CLC design that carefully combines them and achieves better accuracy.
• Score: 0.6338047104436421
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation improves large language models' accuracy by adding relevant retrieved text to the prompt. Chunk level caching (CLC) accelerates inference by precomputing KV caches for these retrieved chunks and reusing them. However, these caches miss cross-attention dependencies between chunks, which can reduce output quality. Several methods try to improve CLC accuracy using different techniques. We make two main contributions. First, we show that existing CLC approaches have fundamental limitations that limit their accuracy or their applicability. We back this conclusion with an extensive CLC system experimental evaluation. Second, we observe that existing CLC techniques are complementary. We leverage this insight to propose a new CLC design that carefully combines them and achieves better accuracy.

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