Agentic workflows organize complex tasks into reusable procedures. However, invoking an LLM at every step incurs repeated inference costs and delays. We propose a framework for self-evolving agentic workflows through semantic task decomposition. Each subtask has explicit applicability conditions and a procedure that executes code or invokes a model as needed. An agent uses execution feedback to refine the decomposition and update these procedures. Experiments in the GLEE competition show the framework on bargaining, negotiation and persuasion. Most observed final-decision procedures are implemented in code. Code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/NeurIPS2026_SeaFlow.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: (a) Bargaining decision paths at revision a1875a0 ; leaves return plan parameters. (b) The agent’s workflow revision cycle, from execution feedback to a retained workflow.
Measure
Bargaining
Negotiation
Persuasion
Official rating ↑
2760.27
2761.67
2261.58
Mean branches per strategy node
2.13
2.25
2.24
Mean strategy judgments per action
37.61
22.95
7.42
Mean local decision time (ms)
0.118
0.198
0.122
Table 1: Competition ratings and mean statistics of the final workflows (revision a1875a0 ).
Figure 2: Competition rating history and strategy changes on the same 725-iteration axis. Top: recorded deployment segments, one rating per plotted iteration. Bottom: representative strategy changes, with iteration numbers and operation markers.
Figure 3: (a) Shares of designed decision modules by executor across iterations. (b) Decision time per executor against strategy judgments per decision (log scale). Crosses mark failed LLM calls.
Figure 4: Share of non-message actions with a valid LLM-judge response per iteration, by task. Triangles mark responses that change the action. Dotted lines mark Persuasion leaving the judge.
Appendix figures & tables13 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 5: Execution order of the final workflows for one move. Within a box, rows are checked from top to bottom and indentation marks nested checks; dashed boxes are optional model calls.
Figure 6: Situations and procedures of the final workflows on replayed decision states. Each row is one situation; its bar gives the share of states, colored by the second-level split, and the right column lists the procedures chosen within that situation.
Figure 7: An actual Bargaining revision. Left: the acceptance branch introduced at position 236, with all its conditions and the fallback to the existing procedure. Right: the motivating situation and expected behavior documented in the same commit’s tests. Earlier branches retain precedence. The diagram shows a local code change, not the entire workflow.
Figure 8: Revision activity per 25 iterations. (a) Commits on the main line and on experimental branches. (b) Added, modified and removed workflow functions. (c) Changed code units by revision operation.
Figure 9: Changed code units per 25 iterations by game and revision operation. Shared modules hold code and learned artifacts used by more than one game.
Figure 10: Evidence named in commit messages across iterations. Curves give the smoothed share of iterations with each mark. Ticks below mark the individual commits.
Policy
Steps
Persuasion seller with a low-quality product
1 skip → 22 recommend → 29 skip → 31 recommend until the first sale
Bargaining plateau exit
548 shadow → 552 live → 564 reverted → 579 live with a guard → 585 split into finite and open horizons
Bargaining Rubinstein responder
553 shadow → 556 live → 557 shadow → 559 live on a narrower band → 560 shadow
Appendix
Table 2: Policies that change direction during development. Each step gives the iteration and the behavior that follows it.
Figure 11: Regression tests during development. (a) Test functions on the main line. (b) Share of strategy commits per 25 iterations that also change tests.
Iteration
Problem
Revision
Test checks that
97
Message wording misread
Refine conditions
a current recommendation outweighs earlier skip wording
110
Opponent style misjudged
Update the estimate
recent stalls, not an early concession, set the style
285
Low-payoff deals accepted
Refine conditions
a non-final offer at the bottom of the field is not accepted
608
Same message rejected again and again
Refine conditions and change the procedure
a rejected counter message is not sent again
676
Opponent misjudged
Update the estimate and refine conditions
the current opponent’s revealed outcomes override the global prior
Appendix
Table 3: Diagnosed problems, the revisions they trigger and the regression tests that record them.
Measure
Bargaining
Negotiation
Persuasion
Competition snapshot
Official rating ↑
2760.27
2761.67
2261.58
Cumulative games
8,256
27,226
7,435
Fixed-workflow behavior sample
Games with action records
512
199
401
Recorded actions
2,344
1,912
7,993
Appendix
Table 4: Competition results, fixed-workflow samples, and examined strategies. The September 1 snapshot contains 42,917 cumulative games across the three environments. Fixed-workflow statistics describe a separate analysis sample of 1,112 games and 12,249 action records, including messages; they are not additional games to add to the competition total. Ratings are snapshot values, not averages over the fixed batches.
Condition
Eligible
Executed
Recorded action
Opening imitation
63
63
offer 55% self-share
Reservation lock
451
382
reject below 60%/47%
Low-share predictor gate
8
8
reject
Appendix
Table 5: Condition-to-action checks on fixed Bargaining records. Eligibility does not imply execution when an earlier condition takes precedence.
Figure 12: Final decision labels in fixed-workflow records. Grey segments include 31 unclassified Bargaining records and nine unresolved Negotiation records; eight Bargaining records use a predictor. Runtime LLM judging is disabled in all three deployments. Label definitions are environment-specific; detailed counts and bounds are given in the text.
Figure 13: Recorded LLM decisions across two commit windows. (a) Valid model selections as a percentage of recorded non-message actions. (b) Selections that change the program’s proposed action, using the same denominator. Labels include raw counts. Both axes are linear but use different ranges; the plotted events do not count every attempted call.
Although agentic workflows have demonstrated strong potential for solving complex tasks, existing automated generation methods remain inefficient and underperform, as they rely on predefined operator libraries and homogeneous LLM-only workflows in which all task-level computation is performed through probabilistic inference. To address these limitations, we propose HyEvo, an automated workflow-generation framework that leverages heterogeneous atomic synthesis. HyEvo integrates probabilistic LLM nodes for semantic reasoning with deterministic code nodes for rule-based execution, offloading predictable operations from LLM inference and reducing inference cost and execution latency. To efficiently navigate the hybrid search space, HyEvo employs an LLM-driven multi-island evolutionary strategy with a reflect-then-generate mechanism, iteratively refining both workflow topology and node logic via execution feedback. Comprehensive experiments show that HyEvo consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse reasoning and coding benchmarks, while reducing inference cost and execution latency by up to 19× and 16×, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art open-source baseline.
Beibei Xu, Yutong Ye, Chuyun Shen +3
East China Normal University · Beihang University · Shanghai University of International Business and Economics +1
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.
Shuo Hao, You Lu, Bihuan Chen +1
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, China
Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex tasks, including code generation, tool use, and multi-hop question answering. Existing self-improvement methods enhance agent performance through model optimization, harness evolution, and executable artifact refinement, while recursive self-improvement (RSI) further extends optimization to the improvement mechanisms themselves. However, adapting self-improvement workflows to evolving performance bottlenecks while improving workflow orchestration through execution feedback remains a key challenge. We propose RSIFlow, a Recursive Self-Improvement framework that integrates adaptive workflow orchestration with meta-agent capability evolution. RSIFlow diagnoses performance bottlenecks from task-agent trajectories and environmental feedback to dynamically select component-specific improvement workflows. The meta-agent then distills workflow outcomes into component-specific skills and cross-component principles, evolving its own harness to improve subsequent workflow orchestration. Experiments across six benchmarks and two backbone models show that RSIFlow achieves the SOTA average performance on all benchmarks. Ablation studies further demonstrate the contributions of adaptive workflow orchestration and meta-harness evolution. Code is available at https://github.com/1HUAN1/RSI-Flow.
Huan Zhang, Mingju Chen, Dongxu Zhou +4
Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University · Tsinghua University · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)