English

Semantic Caching of Contextual Summaries for Efficient Question-Answering with Language Models

Computation and Language 2025-05-19 v1 Artificial Intelligence Information Retrieval Machine Learning

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across edge and cloud platforms for real-time question-answering and retrieval-augmented generation. However, processing lengthy contexts in distributed systems incurs high computational overhead, memory usage, and network bandwidth. This paper introduces a novel semantic caching approach for storing and reusing intermediate contextual summaries, enabling efficient information reuse across similar queries in LLM-based QA workflows. Our method reduces redundant computations by up to 50-60% while maintaining answer accuracy comparable to full document processing, as demonstrated on NaturalQuestions, TriviaQA, and a synthetic ArXiv dataset. This approach balances computational cost and response quality, critical for real-time AI assistants.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.11271,
  title  = {Semantic Caching of Contextual Summaries for Efficient Question-Answering with Language Models},
  author = {Camille Couturier and Spyros Mastorakis and Haiying Shen and Saravan Rajmohan and Victor Rühle},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.11271},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Preprint. Paper accepted at ICCCN 2025, the final version will appear in the proceedings

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:36:04.687Z