StepKV：面向 LLM 智能体的步感知 KV 缓存压缩

Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2609.22158 (cs) [Submitted on 26 Aug 2026 (v1), last revised 22 Sep 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:StepKV: Step-Aware KV Cache Compression for LLM Agents Authors:Boyu Feng, Jiahong Liu, Yifan Li, Wenhao Yu, Zexuan Qiu, Yuliang Sun, Ming Shen, Xiang Li, Quanyu Dai, Irwin King View a PDF of the paper titled StepKV: Step-Aware KV Cache Compression for LLM Agents, by Boyu Feng and 9 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Key-value (KV) caching is essential for efficient autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference, but the cache grows linearly with context length, increasing storage and decoding costs. KV cache compression mitigates this cost by retaining only a subset of cached tokens. This challenge is particularly important for multi-step LLM agents, where a query expands into trajectories of reasoning, tool interactions, and retrieved observations. Existing pruning methods typically treat the cache as a flat token stream and rank tokens by recency or attention saliency. This creates a mismatch between the unit of compression and the unit of reasoning: token-level pruning removes individual entries, whereas useful information in multi-step agents is often organized into reasoning steps with uneven and delayed importance. Consequently, an early observation or intermediate decision may receive little recent attention yet remain essential for later evidence synthesis. We term this failure mode Reasoning Continuity this http URL observations motivate KV cache compression that jointly considers token- and reasoning-step-level information. StepKV addresses this goal by treating reasoning steps as first-class retention units. It associates cache entries with their generating steps, estimates step utility from trajectory-derived signals, and combines this utility with token-level saliency. The resulting scores globally rank prunable tokens, from which StepKV retains the top-scoring entries under a target budget. StepKV thus provides a step-centric perspective for agent KV cache compression. Across multi-hop QA and long-horizon web reasoning tasks, StepKV sustains accuracy under low KV budgets where token-level baselines degrade sharply, offering a more robust efficiency-accuracy trade-off for multi-step agent inference. Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2609.22158 [cs.LG] (or arXiv:2609.22158v2 [cs.LG] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22158 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Boyu Feng [view email] [v1] Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:22:58 UTC (1,852 KB) [v2] Tue, 22 Sep 2026 07:50:21 UTC (4,813 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled StepKV: Step-Aware KV Cache Compression for LLM Agents, by Boyu Feng and 9 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.LG new | recent | 2026-09 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) IArxiv recommender toggle IArxiv Recommender (What is IArxiv?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)