cs.LGMar 23, 2026

Chimera: Latency- and Performance-Aware Multi-agent Serving for Heterogeneous LLMs

Authors: Kangqi Ni, Wenyue Hua, Xiaoxiang Shi, Jiang Guo, Shiyu Chang, Tianlong Chen

Organizations: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill · Microsoft · Carnegie Mellon University · Amazon · 

Abstract

Multi-agent applications often execute complex tasks as multi-stage workflows, where each stage is an LLM call whose output becomes part of context for subsequent steps. Existing LLM serving systems largely assume homogeneous clusters with identical model replicas. This design overlooks the potential of heterogeneous deployments, where models of different sizes and capabilities enable finer trade-offs between latency and performance. However, heterogeneity introduces new challenges in scheduling across models with diverse throughput and performance. We present Chimera, a predictive scheduling system for multi-agent workflow serving on heterogeneous LLM clusters that jointly improves end-to-end latency and task performance. Chimera applies semantic routing to estimate per-model confidence scores for each request, predicts the total remaining output length of the workflow, and estimates per-model congestion using in-flight predicted token volumes for load balancing. We evaluate Chimera on representative agentic workflows for code generation and math reasoning using multiple heterogeneous LLM configurations. Across comparable settings, Chimera traces the best latency-performance frontier, reducing end-to-end latency by 1.2--2.4×\times and improving task performance by 8.0-9.5 percentage points on average over competitive baselines including vLLM.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables3 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Pythia: Exploiting Workflow Predictability for Efficient Agent-Native LLM Serving

    Apr 28, 2026Shan Yu, Junyi Shu, Yuanjiang Ni +14LLM Inference EfficiencyMulti-Agent LLM Systems

  2. Efficient LLM Serving for Agentic Workflows: A Data Systems Perspective

    Mar 17, 2026Noppanat Wadlom, Junyi Shen, Yao LuLLM ServingLLM Agent Workflow Optimization

  3. Scepsy: Serving Agentic Workflows Using Aggregate LLM Pipelines

    Apr 16, 2026Otto White, Marcel Wagenländer, Britannio Jarrett +7LLM InferenceLLM Inference Scheduling