English

ContextPilot: Fast Long-Context Inference via Context Reuse

Machine Learning 2026-05-07 v4

Abstract

AI applications increasingly depend on long-context inference, where LLMs consume substantial context to support stronger reasoning. Common examples include retrieval-augmented generation, agent memory layers, and multi-agent orchestration. As input contexts get longer, prefill latency becomes the main bottleneck. Yet today's prefill acceleration techniques face a trade-off: they either preserve reasoning quality but deliver little KV-cache reuse, or improve reuse at the cost of degraded reasoning quality. We present ContextPilot, a system that accelerates prefill by introducing context reuse as a new mechanism for faster long-context inference. ContextPilot introduces a context index to identify overlapping context blocks across LLM interactions (e.g., across users and turns). It further proposes context ordering and de-duplication techniques to maximize KV-cache reuse. To preserve reasoning quality under reuse, it introduces succinct context annotations that prevent quality degradation. Finally, ContextPilot is built around a modular architecture with a clean interface that integrates with existing inference engines. Extensive evaluation shows that ContextPilot reduces LLM prefill latency by up to 3×3\times{} compared to state-of-the-art methods while preserving reasoning quality. At longer context lengths, it can even improve reasoning quality. ContextPilot is open-sourced at: https://github.com/EfficientContext/ContextPilot.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.03475,
  title  = {ContextPilot: Fast Long-Context Inference via Context Reuse},
  author = {Yinsicheng Jiang and Yeqi Huang and Liang Cheng and Cheng Deng and Xuan Sun and Luo Mai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.03475},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:22:52.453Z