Move the Query, Not the Cache: Characterizing Cross-Instance Latent Attention Redistribution Across GPU Fabrics

ArXi:2606.01502v1 Announce Type: cross Frontier LLMs increasingly decide what a query attends to with a sparse-attention indexer that picks a few KV-cache blocks per query: attention's unit is now a small, reusable chunk. Agentic workloads hammer it: many sub-agents query one large codebase, reusing the same blocks. When that corpus outgrows one GPU it is partitioned across instances, so a query and the blocks it selects often sit on different GPUs: answering it means attention across instances.