Augmented Backpressure for Decentralized Management of Agentic Networks

Abstract

Agentic foundation-model service networks handle requests spanning retrieval, planning, generation, verification, and tool use. Unlike traditional communication networks, control performance depends on queue dynamics and contextual memory states, including prefix/KV blocks, retrieved contexts, expert warm states, and verified tool outputs. These states arise from execution history and alter service work and downstream successor laws under finite local budgets. Treating them as passive caches or an independent process leaves a queueing-control gap. To this end, we propose \emph{Memory-Augmented Backpressure} (MABP), a queue--memory control framework for stateful foundation-model service networks (SFMSNs) that jointly models commodity queues and causal contextual memory dynamics. MABP represents each request by service and state types, estimates memory-dependent work, penalties, and successor probabilities, then reads queues and resident memory each slot, selects feasible routing, transfer, activation, and service actions using a memory-dependent pressure score, and retains a budget-feasible subset of resident and newly generated objects. We prove an occupation-measure capacity outer bound with conditional tightness. We show that modeling contextual memory can strictly increase the stability region through work reduction and transition shaping, establishing a separation between memory-aware and memory-oblivious decisions. We also prove throughput and drift-plus-penalty guarantees for exact frame-MABP with bounded-loss extensions to approximate solvers.