English

CIFLEX: Contextual Instruction Flow for Sub-task Execution in Multi-Turn Interactions with a Single On-Device LLM

Computation and Language 2025-10-03 v1

Abstract

We present CIFLEX (Contextual Instruction Flow for Sub-task Execution), which is a novel execution system for efficient sub-task handling in multi-turn interactions with a single on-device large language model (LLM). As LLMs become increasingly capable, a single model is expected to handle diverse sub-tasks that more effectively and comprehensively support answering user requests. Naive approach reprocesses the entire conversation context when switching between main and sub-tasks (e.g., query rewriting, summarization), incurring significant computational overhead. CIFLEX mitigates this overhead by reusing the key-value (KV) cache from the main task and injecting only task-specific instructions into isolated side paths. After sub-task execution, the model rolls back to the main path via cached context, thereby avoiding redundant prefill computation. To support sub-task selection, we also develop a hierarchical classification strategy tailored for small-scale models, decomposing multi-choice decisions into binary ones. Experiments show that CIFLEX significantly reduces computational costs without degrading task performance, enabling scalable and efficient multi-task dialogue on-device.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.01239,
  title  = {CIFLEX: Contextual Instruction Flow for Sub-task Execution in Multi-Turn Interactions with a Single On-Device LLM},
  author = {Juntae Lee and Jihwan Bang and Seunghan Yang and Simyung Chang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.01239},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

accepted at EMNLP 2025 (main)

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:11:26.418Z