cs.CLJun 15, 2026

TokenPilot: Cache-Efficient Context Management for LLM Agents

Authors: Buqiang XuZirui XueDianmou ChenChenyang FuChiyu WuCaiying HuangChen JiangJizhan Fang+7 more

Organizations: 1Zhejiang University · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · 3Xi’an University of Electronic Science and Technology · 4HomologyAI

Abstract

As LLM agents are deployed in long-horizon sessions, context accumulation drives up inference costs. Existing approaches utilize text pruning or dynamic memory eviction to minimize token footprints; however, their unconstrained sequence mutations alter layouts, introducing prefix mismatches and cache invalidation. This reveals a critical trade-off between text sparsity and prompt cache continuity. To address this, we present TokenPilot, a dual-granularity context management framework. Globally, Ingestion-Aware Compaction acts as a framework harness to stabilize prompt prefixes and eliminate open-world environmental noise at the ingestion gate. Locally, Lifecycle-Aware Eviction monitors the ongoing residual utility of context segments, enforcing a conservative batch-turn schedule to offload content segments only when task relevance expires. Experiments on PinchBench and Claw-Eval under both isolated and continuous modes demonstrate that TokenPilot reduces costs by 61% and 56% in isolated mode, and 61% and 87% in continuous mode, while maintaining competitive performance compared to prior systems. TokenPilot has been integrated into LightMem2 at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem2.

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