English

TokenCake: A KV-Cache-centric Serving Framework for LLM-based Multi-Agent Applications

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2026-05-21 v3

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in complex multi-agent applications that rely on external function calls. This workload creates severe performance challenges for the KV Cache: spatial contention leads to the eviction of critical agents' caches and temporal underutilization leaves the cache of agents stalled on long-running function calls idling in GPU memory. We present TokenCake, a KV-Cache-centric serving framework that bridges this gap by co-optimizing scheduling and memory management through an agent-aware design. TokenCake's Temporal Scheduler employs an event-driven, opportunistic policy to proactively offload idle KV Caches during function calls and uses predictive uploading to hide data transfer latency. TokenCake's Spatial Scheduler uses dynamic memory partitioning, guided by a hybrid priority metric combining graph structure and runtime state, to reserve GPU memory for critical-path agents. Our evaluation on representative multi-agent benchmarks shows that TokenCake reduces end-to-end latency by over 47.06% and improves effective GPU memory utilization by up to 16.9% compared to vLLM.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.18586,
  title  = {TokenCake: A KV-Cache-centric Serving Framework for LLM-based Multi-Agent Applications},
  author = {Zhuohang Bian and Feiyang Wu and Zhuoran Li and Teng Ma and Youwei Zhuo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.18586},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 17 figures, 3 tables, 2 algorithms

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:57:48.681Z