ArborKV: Structure-Aware KV Cache Management for Scaling Tree-based LLM Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22106v1
• Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 07:40:57 GMT
• Title: ArborKV: Structure-Aware KV Cache Management for Scaling Tree-based LLM Reasoning
• Abstract summary: Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT) organizes inference to tree-structured search with branching and backtracking.<n> retaining KV states for a frontier of partial trajectories quickly becomes a memory bottleneck.<n>We propose ArborKV, a structure-aware eviction framework that couples a lightweight value estimator with a tree-aware allocation policy.
• Score: 8.78883720506938
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Recent progress in LLM reasoning has increasingly shifted from single-pass generation to explicit search over intermediate reasoning states. Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT) organizes inference to tree-structured search with branching and backtracking, but it substantially amplifies the Key--Value (KV) cache: retaining KV states for a frontier of partial trajectories quickly becomes a memory bottleneck that limits throughput and constrains search depth and width under fixed hardware budgets. We address this challenge by observing that KV reuse in ToT-style inference is governed by search dynamics: near-term decoding depends primarily on the active branch and its ancestors, whereas inactive subtrees have low short-term reuse probability yet must remain recoverable for backtracking. Motivated by this, we propose ArborKV, a structure-aware eviction framework that couples a lightweight value estimator with a tree-aware allocation policy, and performs purely token-extractive eviction with lazy rehydration to support revisits. Experiments on ToT-style reasoning benchmarks show that ArborKV achieves up to ~4x peak KV-memory reduction while preserving near-full-retention accuracy, enabling larger search configurations under fixed device budgets that would otherwise run out of memory.

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