Ask the Tool, Don't Guess: Agent Tool Calls Hold Their Progress, and the Serving System Should Read It
An agentic request spends substantial wall-clock time waiting for tools, and its KV cache holds GPU memory the whole time. Serving systems decide whether that cache stays, leaves, or comes back by guessing how long the tool will run, from the tool's name, its history, a duration declared before the call, or the engine's own occupancy. We show that no estimate fixed before a call starts can know its duration, and such estimates may not even rank the calls. Meanwhile, the running tool already holds the answer, but the agent stack together with the tool silences it. We propose that tool calls report their progress explicitly while they run, and we measure what that takes. A census of four pu...
| Authors | Yipeng Liu, Yingqiang Zhang, Feifei Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.DC |
| Published | 16 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 September 2026 |
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