Toward Systems Foundations for Agentic Exploration

Abstract: Agentic exploration, letting LLM-powered agents branch, backtrack, and search across many execution paths, demands systems support well beyond today's pass-at-k resets. Our benchmark of six snapshot/restore mechanisms shows that generic tools such as CRIU or container commits are not fast enough even in isolated testbeds, and they crumble entirely in real deployments where agents share files, sockets, and cloud APIs with other agents and human users. In this talk, we pinpoint three open fundamental challenges: fork semantics, which concerns how branches reveal or hide tentative updates; external side-effects, where fork awareness must be added to services or their calls intercepted; and native forking, which requires cloning databases and runtimes in microseconds without bulk copying.