Why Search When You Can Transfer? Amortized Agentic Workflow Design from Structural Priors
Authors: Shiyi Du, Jiayuan Liu, Weihua Du, Yue Huang, Jiayi Li, Yingtao Luo, Xiangliang Zhang, Vincent Conitzer, +1 more
Organizations: Carnegie Mellon University · Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab (FOCAL) · University of Notre Dame
Abstract
Automated agentic workflow design currently relies on per-task iterative search, which is computationally prohibitive and fails to reuse structural knowledge across tasks. We observe that optimized workflows converge to a small family of domain-specific topologies, suggesting that this combinatorial search is largely redundant. Building on this insight, we propose SWIFT (Synthesizing Workflows via Few-shot Transfer), a framework that amortizes workflow design into reusable structural priors. SWIFT first distills compositional heuristics and output-interface contracts from contrastive analysis of prior search trajectories across source tasks. At inference time, it conditions a single LLM generation pass on these priors together with cross-task workflow demonstrations to synthesize a complete, executable workflow for an unseen target task, bypassing iterative search entirely. On five benchmarks, SWIFT outperforms the state-of-the-art search-based method while reducing marginal per-task optimization cost by three orders of magnitude. It further generalizes to four additional unseen benchmarks and transfers successfully from GPT-4o-mini to three additional foundation models (Grok, Qwen, Gemma). Controlled ablations reveal that workflow demonstrations primarily transfer topological structure rather than surface semantics: replacing all operator names with random strings still retains over 93% of the full system's average performance.
Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems are increasingly powerful, but current agentic workflow optimization paradigms make an unsatisfying trade-off. Task-level methods spend substantial offline compute yet deploy only a single workflow, leaving complementary candidates unused, while query-level methods synthesize a new workflow per query at substantial inference cost. Our motivating analysis shows these paradigms are more complementary than competing: workflows discovered during offline search often solve different subsets of queries, and many queries handled by expensive query-level generation can already be solved by cheaper precomputed workflows. This suggests a different objective: rather than searching for one universally best workflow or regenerating one per instance, we should build a compact bank of reusable, complementary workflows and select among them adaptively at inference time. Doing so requires solving three coupled problems: generating complementary rather than redundant candidates, compressing them into a small deployable portfolio, and assigning each query to the right workflow under a performance-cost trade-off. To this end, we present FlowBank, a three-stage framework for portfolio-based agentic workflow optimization. Diversifying proposes DiverseFlow to steer search toward under-covered queries and produce a high-coverage candidate pool. Curating proposes CuraFlow to compress this pool into a compact portfolio with minimal redundancy. Matching casts deployment as edge-value prediction on a query-workflow bipartite graph and routes each incoming query to the portfolio member with the best predicted utility. Across five benchmarks, FlowBank achieves the highest average score among the evaluated methods while remaining cost-competitive, improving over the strongest automated and handcrafted baselines by 4.26% and 14.92% relative, respectively.
Agentic workflows have become an important abstraction for building reliable LLM-based automation systems by organizing large language models (LLMs), tools, and control logic into explicit execution structures. However, constructing high-quality agentic workflows remains largely manual and requires substantial domain expertise. Recent studies have explored automatic agentic workflow generation from historical task-solving records, but they mainly produce LLM-centric workflows, where real tool executions are abstracted and simulated by LLM nodes, limiting the usability and stability of generated workflows. To address these limitations, we propose FlowScout, an execution-guided framework for generating tool-integrated agentic workflows from historical task-solving records. Specifically, FlowScout represents an agentic workflow as a directed graph composed of LLM nodes, tool-calling nodes, and dependency edges. It first mines a common tool coordination skeleton from historical records to construct an initial workflow, and then refines the workflow topology through Monte Carlo tree search guided by execution feedback. We evaluate FlowScout on four representative task domains and compare it with three baselines, i.e., PM4Py, ReAct and AFlow. Experimental results show that agentic workflows generated by FlowScout improve tool invocation correctness by at least 92.69% and execution quality by at least 17.66% over the baselines, while achieving lower performance variation across repeated runs.
Scientific workflow systems automate execution -- scheduling, fault tolerance, resource management -- but not the semantic translation that precedes it. Scientists still manually convert research questions into workflow specifications, a task requiring both domain knowledge and infrastructure expertise. We propose an agentic architecture that closes this gap through three layers: an LLM interprets natural language into structured intents (semantic layer); validated generators produce reproducible workflow DAGs (deterministic layer); and domain experts author ``Skills'': markdown documents encoding vocabulary mappings, parameter constraints, and optimization strategies (knowledge layer). This decomposition confines LLM non-determinism to intent extraction: identical intents always yield identical workflows. We implement and evaluate the architecture on the 1000 Genomes population genetics workflow and Hyperflow WMS running on Kubernetes. In an ablation study on 150 queries, Skills raise full-match intent accuracy from 44% to 83%; skill-driven deferred workflow generation reduces data transfer by 92%; and the end-to-end pipeline completes queries on Kubernetes with LLM overhead below 15 seconds and cost under $0.001 per query.