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arXiv · 2607.02574

From Tensor Buffer to Distributed Memory Hierarchy: A Survey of KV Cache Management for LLM Serving

Jie Li·Tongyang Wang·Yong Chen
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Abstract

The key-value (KV) cache has become a first-order memory object in LLM serving rather than a temporary per-request tensor. This survey classifies more than thirty KV-management systems and frameworks using four axes: locality, lifetime, ownership, and substrate. The axes reveal five architectural archetypes -- local-paged, disaggregated-pipeline, shared-store, memory-pool, and hybrid-tier. Once workload and hardware are fixed, ownership accounts for much of the remaining design variance among distributed systems. The survey also audits current evaluations and identifies seven missing KV-specific measurements, linking them to open problems in fault tolerance, isolation, tiered eviction, speculative decoding, MoE serving, and shared-cache semantics.

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Jie Li, Tongyang Wang, Yong Chen. 2026-06-30. From Tensor Buffer to Distributed Memory Hierarchy: A Survey of KV Cache Management for LLM Serving. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02574

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