SkillOrchestra: Learning to Route Agents via Skill Transfer
Organizations: University of Wisconsin-Madison · Salesforce AI Research
Abstract
Compound AI systems promise capabilities beyond those of individual models, yet their success depends critically on effective orchestration. Existing routing approaches face two limitations: (1) input-level routers make coarse query-level decisions that ignore evolving task requirements; (2) RL-trained orchestrators are expensive to adapt and often suffer from routing collapse, repeatedly invoking one strong but costly option in multi-turn scenarios. We introduce SkillOrchestra, a framework for skill-aware orchestration. Instead of directly learning a routing policy end-to-end, SkillOrchestra learns fine-grained skills from execution experience and models agent-specific competence and cost under those skills. At deployment, the orchestrator infers the skill demands of the current interaction and selects agents that best satisfy them under an explicit performance-cost trade-off. Extensive experiments across ten benchmarks demonstrate that SkillOrchestra outperforms SoTA RL-based orchestrators by up to 22.5% with 700x and 300x learning cost reduction compared to Router-R1 and ToolOrchestra, respectively. These results show that explicit skill modeling enables scalable, interpretable, and sample-efficient orchestration, offering a principled alternative to data-intensive RL-based approaches. The code is available at: https://github.com/jiayuww/SkillOrchestra.
Figures & tables
| Method | General QA | Multi-Hop QA | Avg. | |||||
| NQ | TriviaQA | PopQA | HotpotQA | 2wiki | Musique | Bamboogle | ||
| Vanilla | 9.2 | 26.0 | 12.2 | 14.0 | 26.6 | 2.6 | 4.0 | 13.5 |
| No Routing | ||||||||
| SFT | 21.2 | 40.0 | 16.0 | 19.8 | 25.6 | 5.2 | 11.2 | 19.9 |
| RAG | 29.8 | 54.0 | 36.6 | 21.6 | 14.6 | 7.8 | 22.4 | 26.7 |
| CoT ( Wei et al., 2022 ) | 12.6 | 35.8 | 16.0 | 16.8 | 20.8 | 4.6 | 22.4 | 18.4 |
| Setting | HB | Disc | Ref | Sel | FG | Acc % | Cost $ |
| No HB | 71.0 | 122.9 | |||||
| No Ref + Sel | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 79.0 | 5.5 | ||
| No Selection | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 79.3 | 3.4 | |
| No FG Skills | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 80.4 | 15.1 | |
| Full System | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 85.0 | 9.3 |
LLM Agent Orchestration
Large language model agent orchestration coordinates models, tools, and workflows to complete complex tasks reliably and efficiently.
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