HeteroFold lets Llama, Qwen, and Ministral share KV caches across families, running about 10.7x faster than native prefill at 32K context
The work proposes HeteroFold, a prefill-free cross-family KV cache transfer method that keeps both sender and receiver frozen and, through token alignment over shared character boundaries, cross-layer and cross-head K/V mapping, and receiver-aware calibration, achieves the best cache-transfer performance on all four long-context benchmarks across six transfer directions among Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen3-4B, and Ministral-3-14B, matches text-based communication on the HiddenBench multi-agent benchmark, and at 32K context makes Llama-3.1-8B to Ministral-3-14B transfer about 10.7x faster than native prefill.