KV缓存复用在多智能体系统中会破坏判官模型的决策一致性。
When KV Cache Reuse Fails in Multi-Agent Systems: Cross-Candidate Interaction is Crucial for LLM Judges

- 通过跨候选交互机制修复缓存复用导致的注意力削弱问题。
- 在GSM8K等数据集上,缓存复用使判官选择一致性下降超过40%。
- 适合关注大模型判官推理效率与稳定性的研究者阅读。
多智能体大模型系统通常生成多个候选响应,并由大模型判官进行聚合。为降低此类流水线中的主要预填充成本,近期工作提倡在部分共享上下文间复用键值(KV)缓存,并报告生成代理显著提速。本文发现,这些效率提升无法均匀转移到以判官为中心的推理中。在GSM8K、MMLU和HumanEval上,我们发现对执行代理有效的复用策略会严重扰动判官行为:最终任务准确率看似稳定,但判官选择与密集预填充相比高度不一致。我们通过判官一致性率(JCR)量化该风险,并提供诊断表明,缓存复用系统性削弱了跨候选注意力,尤其影响后期候选块。消融实验进一步证明,显式跨候选交互对于保持密集预填充决策至关重要。总体而言,我们的结果揭示了KV缓存复用此前被忽视的失效模式,并强调判官中心推理是一个需要专门、风险感知系统设计的独特范式。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multi-agent LLM systems routinely generate multiple candidate responses that are aggregated by an LLM judge. To reduce the dominant prefill cost in such pipelines, recent work advocates KV cache reuse across partially shared contexts and reports substantial speedups for generation agents. In this work, we show that these efficiency gains do not transfer uniformly to judge-centric inference. Across GSM8K, MMLU, and HumanEval, we find that reuse strategies that are effective for execution agents can severely perturb judge behavior: end-task accuracy may appear stable, yet the judge's selection becomes highly inconsistent with dense prefill. We quantify this risk using Judge Consistency Rate (JCR) and provide diagnostics showing that reuse systematically weakens cross-candidate attention, especially for later candidate blocks. Our ablation further demonstrates that explicit cross-candidate interaction is crucial for preserving dense-prefill decisions. Overall, our results identify a previously overlooked failure mode of KV cache reuse and highlight judge-centric inference as a distinct regime that demands dedicated, risk-aware system design.
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