Adaptive KV Retention for LLM Agents at Human-Approval Timescales

Abstract

Unlike the seconds-scale tool-call pauses targeted by prior agent-serving systems, agentic LLM requests can be suspended for minutes or hours while waiting for human approval. We study how suspension and resumption affect GPU serving performance and develop a retention policy that balances active-serving capacity against future recomputation under uncertain approval waits. The central tension is severe because retaining suspended KV preserves fast resume but can consume enough GPU capacity to reduce active-serving goodput by 41%, while evicting it avoids that residency cost at the expense of nearly $10\times$ higher resume latency when the request returns. We develop a tiered retention controller around GPU opportunity cost, which expresses the serving capacity consumed by preserving or reconstructing a suspended request's KV state in a common GPU-time cost. Within host memory, the controller selects between indefinite retention and load-indexed expiration using calibration wait samples, without requiring per-request wait prediction. On human-scale approval workloads, our controller improves active-request goodput by 23-51% over the vLLM baselines, 22-29% over MORI, and 41-52% over Continuum.