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From Tensor Buffer to Distributed Memory Hierarchy: A Survey of KV Cache Management for LLM Serving

2026-06-30 16:12:40
Jie Li, Tongyang Wang, Yong Chen
arXiv_AI
     
Abstract

The key-value (KV) cache has become a first-order memory object in LLM serving rather than a temporary per-request tensor. This survey classifies more than thirty KV-management systems and frameworks using four axes: locality, lifetime, ownership, and substrate. The axes reveal five architectural archetypes -- local-paged, disaggregated-pipeline, shared-store, memory-pool, and hybrid-tier. Once workload and hardware are fixed, ownership accounts for much of the remaining design variance among distributed systems. The survey also audits current evaluations and identifies seven missing KV-specific measurements, linking them to open problems in fault tolerance, isolation, tiered eviction, speculative decoding, MoE serving, and shared-cache semantics.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02574

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.02574.pdf

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