Agentic Workflows

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15 papers in the last 28 days · 0.2% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-21

8 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Agentic Workflows.

Period ending 2026-09-14

5 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Agentic Workflows.

Period ending 2026-09-07

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Agentic Workflows.

154 papers

Latest in Agentic Workflows

Jul 3, 2026cs.DC

A Workflow-Aware Serving Layer for Agentic Applications

Agentic AI applications form an emerging serving workload in which a request creates a workflow: a directed acyclic graph of LLM and tool calls that exposes per-node model choices and optional quality operators such as verifiers. This workload falls between two existing layers. Model-serving engines execute individual calls efficiently but cannot see workflow structure, while agent frameworks fix the workflow but cannot see backend load, so neither jointly chooses each node's model, verifier, and backend under serving-time conditions. We present Dyserve, a workflow-aware serving layer that fills this gap. Dyserve compiles each workflow's per-node model and verifier choices in one integer linear program (ILP) over a heterogeneous backend pool, priced by skill-conditioned offline profiles that transfer across workflows. This couples with hardware entering only through per-model throughput sweeps, and is weighted to concentrate strong models and verification on the nodes whose errors propagate the furthest. Because no single latency-quality preference fits every workload mix, Dyserve pre-solves the program at several pressure levels at admission and shifts a workflow's uncommitted suffix among these strategies under load, keeping the solver off the load-shift path; a failed tool call triggers a one-time residual re-solve that preserves committed work.
Jiayi Qian, Zishen Wan, Hanchen Yang +3
Jul 2, 2026cs.AI

COMFYCLAW: Self-Evolving Skill Harnesses for Image Generation Workflows

Agents are increasingly used to construct workflows and assist humans in completing recurring tasks more efficiently. As these workflows become repeated and domain-specific, agent memory and reusable skills become increasingly important: agents should be able to recall workflow patterns, execution constraints, and user preferences from previous runs. We study this problem in workflow-based image generation and introduce COMFYCLAW, an agentic skill evolution harness for controlling ComfyUI workflows. COMFYCLAW formulates workflow construction as typed graph editing, exposes tools organized by construction stage, automatically reverts invalid edits, and uses a region-level vision-language model (VLM) verifier to translate visual failures into actionable repair suggestions. The framework further evolves a progressively disclosed skill library, where trajectories, execution errors, and verifier feedback from previous runs are distilled into reusable Agent Skills. Across four benchmark splits, three agent models, and two image backbones, COMFYCLAW achieves the best average image-generation evaluation score across all six agent configurations, outperforming a verifier-only baseline without skill evolution. Human annotations further show that annotators prefer COMFYCLAW over variants without skill evolution. Our results suggest that skill evolution is an effective mechanism for improving agent reliability and performance in recurring visual workflow construction.
Zongxia Li, Dawei Liu, Fuxiao Liu +6
Jul 1, 2026cs.DB

Exploring the Semantic Gap in Agentic Data Systems: A Formative Study of Operationalization Failures in Analytical Workflows

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate queries, invoke tools, and construct analytical workflows. Although recent advances have substantially improved workflow generation and execution, the semantic information required to operationalize analytical concepts often lies beyond what is explicitly represented in database schemas and data values. We present a cross-domain formative study of operationalization failures in agent-generated analytical workflows. Across 236 analytical intents spanning finance, human resources, and public safety domains, we identify 153 recurring failures despite successful workflow generation and execution. Our analysis reveals five recurring classes of failures: comparative grounding, process reasoning, quantitative reasoning, role confusion, and policy grounding. These findings suggest a semantic gap between user-level analytical concepts and the information available to workflow-generation systems. More broadly, they raise questions about the admissibility of analytical operations and suggest that future agentic data systems may require richer semantic representations to bridge the gap between analytical intent and executable computation.
Jalal Mahmud, Eser Kandogan
Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

Mnemosyne: Agentic Transaction Processing for Validating and Repairing AI-generated Workflows

LLMs increasingly generate workflow actions and repairs that may be well formed yet stale, infeasible, conflicting, or destructive of their own evidence. We introduce Agentic Transaction Processing (ATP), which treats generated actions as untrusted proposals until deterministic admission accepts them under an executable constraint set C. Its two-sided principle is: a proposal is not truth, and no proposal foresees every disruption. Anything may propose, but only the runtime admits and commits; unforeseen disruptions trigger bounded reactive repair whose output re-enters admission. Mnemosyne realizes ATP with an append-only transition log, effective-state projection, dependency-safe compensation, and active contract records. Under stated assumptions and relative to C, we prove four safety properties (authority separation, serial-equivalent generative admission, evidence-preserving repair, and obligation containment) and establish bounded reactive repair. Across nine safety benchmarks and a four-case Temporal SDK comparison, ATP rejects every targeted violation while admitting valid work. A matched data-size sweep measures 5.2-6.6% incremental throughput cost over the same local durable commit path and exposes local saturation. In a companion scheduling harness, local repair edits nearly an order of magnitude fewer operations than global recompute; a 12-scenario interruption stress test rejects every stale recovery candidate without losing observations or producing invalid commits. Two bounded pilots route 80 proposals from four heterogeneous LLMs through the same gate with zero invalid commits; 24 of 40 mid-execution proposals are admitted and 16 are rejected, including four explicit safety rejections.
Edward Y. Chang, Longling Geng
Jun 29, 2026cs.CY

The Organizational Behavior of Agentic AI: Collective Intelligence in Human-Agent Workflows

Agentic artificial intelligence is increasingly deployed not as a single assistant but as a collective of planners, solvers, reviewers, memory managers, tool users, and orchestrators. These systems are entering organisational workflows under familiar labels such as teams, managers, committees, markets, and workflows. This article asks whether such agent collectives exhibit organisational behaviour in a sense that is analytically comparable to, yet distinct from, human organisational behaviour. I argue that agentic AI is a partial organisational analogue. It resembles a human organisation because it differentiates work, coordinates interdependence, performs recurrent routines, crosses boundaries, and produces collective outcomes. It differs because these patterns are not sustained by motivation, identity, trust, employment, socialisation, or moral accountability. They are sustained by context architecture: prompts, memory, traces, schemas, tools, validators, and permissions. The article develops contextual transaction cost as the central mechanism linking these similarities and differences. Computational theorising, synthetic task simulations, real LLM agent traces, and robustness analyses show that human-imitation forms often underperform when they add lossy handoffs, correlated deliberation, and verification burdens, whereas shared-state and adaptive forms perform better when they make context durable, inspectable, and task-contingent. The article contributes to organisation studies by theorising agentic AI as an emerging object of organising and by specifying the interface conditions under which human and agentic organisational behaviour can jointly support collective intelligence.
Canhui Liu
Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

AgRefactor: Self-Evolving Agentic Workflow for HLS Compatibility and Performance

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) provides a fast path from concepts to silicon, but converting real-world software into synthesizable HLS code remains challenging due to restrictive language support and the gap between software and hardware programming practices. Existing automated and LLM-based refactoring approaches partially address this problem, yet they often lack flexibility, struggle to scale, and incur high computational costs. We introduce AgRefactor, an LLM-based multi-agent workflow for refactoring software into HLS-compatible programs. AgRefactor incorporates a self-evolving memory system that accumulates and retrieves factual and strategic knowledge across tasks, improving robustness and efficiency on unseen programs. To reduce cost and enhance scalability, it integrates automated refactoring tools, enabling agents to balance LLM-driven rewrites with efficient tool-based transformations. On 9 out of 11 challenging real-world benchmarks, which are 5-10x longer than the most complex cases studied in prior work, AgRefactor outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art automated refactoring tool and a strong LLM-based baseline built on the same framework backbone. Further agentic performance optimization yields a 6.51x geometric mean speedup over the SoTA pragma tuning tool and a 1.20x speedup over optimized open-source designs with less than 20% extra resources. AgRefactor is fully-automated and open-sourced.
Yang Zou, Zijian Ding, Yizhou Sun +1
Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

DeepTrans Studio: Turning Expert Interventions into Shared Team Knowledge in Agentic Translation Workflows

Professional translation is often a team-based process: translators, reviewers, and project managers must coordinate terminology, legal force, and accountability across documents. Yet many LLM-based translation tools treat human corrections as isolated edits. Expert decisions made in one segment or by one member are rarely captured as reusable knowledge for the rest of the team. We present DeepTrans Studio, a collaborative translation workspace that lets professionals intercept selected nodes in an agentic translation workflow, review evidence, revise AI outputs, and save approved decisions to a shared team memory. During the demo, attendees will role-play translators and reviewers, resolve preset terminology and legal-modal risks, and see how their decisions are propagated to downstream segments and surfaced in a teammate's workspace as reusable precedents. The demo illustrates how human interventions in AI-mediated work can become shared, traceable knowledge rather than one-off corrections.
Ziyang Lian, Qingya Zhang, Hao Wang +5
Jun 27, 2026cs.AI

Characterizing Large Language Model Agentic Workflows: A Study on N8n Ecosystem

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted in low-code and no-code automation platforms, where non-expert users design workflows that combine natural language understanding with external services and APIs. LLM agents are LLM systems that use LLMs as a core "brain" to reason, plan, and autonomously execute complex, multi-step tasks. In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study of LLM agentic workflows in low-code automation platforms. We analyze more than 6,000 publicly available n8n workflows and examine four aspects of their design: task distribution, structural and tool use patterns, reliability mechanisms, and autonomy levels. Our analysis shows that LLM workflows are not merely prompt response pipelines. Instead, LLMs are commonly embedded within broader automation structures involving control logic, external tools, communication services, storage systems, and human review points. We further find that while many workflows include lightweight post-processing or routing logic after LLM execution, explicit reliability mechanisms such as structured fallback paths, repair loops, failure-specific alerts, and human approval gates remain relatively uncommon. These results reveal a gap between the increasing deployment of LLM agents in practical automation ecosystems and the limited engineering support for reliability, safety, and governance. Overall, our study provides ten empirical findings and five research takeaways for researchers, platform developers, and practitioners seeking to understand and improve real-world LLM agentic workflows.
Yutian Tang, Yuming Zhou, Huaming Chen
Jun 27, 2026cs.CR

Why Trust Your Agent? Empirical Security Gains from TRiSM-Guided Agentic Workflows in Healthcare

Agent-based AI has enabled the automation of tasks by exposing application tools and resources to large language models (LLMs). However, to improve scope and accuracy, agents are often given access rights that exceed those of ordinary users, introducing significant security risks. AI is routinely integrated into applications with a disregard to security, risking data exposure and breaching regulations. This paper applies the AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (TRiSM) framework to a medical report-generation application to demonstrate how an insecure agent workflow can be transformed into security-conscious agentic workflow. Both workflows were evaluated across five LLMs (Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-4.1-nano, GPT-4.1-mini, GPT-5.4-mini, and Gemini 2.5 Flash) on two report types, totalling 800 generations and 500 attack scenarios including RAG poisoning, data-field injection, and client-side network injection. The TRiSM-guided agentic workflow reduced mean attack success rates from 31% to 10% for RAG poisoning and from 42% to 25% for data-field injection, while eliminating the network injection vector entirely through server-side prompt construction. Furthermore, report accuracy increased by 14 percentage points (72.5% to 86.5%) with the agentic workflow, demonstrating a secure design which provides more reliable outputs. This paper contributes to knowledge by demonstrating least-privilege, defence in depth agentic workflows improving security and accuracy, while also highlighting model choice is a necessary architectural consideration.
Liam Kearns
Jun 25, 2026cs.AI

A Process Harness for Uplifting Legacy Workflows to Agentic BPM: Design and Realization in CUGA FLO

We introduce the process harness, a new mechanism for uplifting legacy workflows into Agentic Business Process Management (Agentic BPM) without replacing the underlying workflow engine. A process harness places a policy-governed agentic layer around a deterministic workflow engine, intercepting designated control points to contribute reasoning, adaptation, and oversight while the engine retains structural authority over the process. To define the process harness rigorously, we develop the Task-Decision-Flow (TDF) model, specifying both its data schema and its execution semantics. TDF decomposes LLM reasoning across three policy-governed agent types: a TaskAgent for knowledge-intensive task execution, a DecisionAgent for per-case gateway routing, and a FlowAgent that governs runtime flow adaptation through a principled hook mechanism. Each agent reasons within an explicit policy drawn from the process FRAME, the aggregate policy set governing all LLM calls in the system. We then present CUGA FLO as the design and implementation realization of the TDF model, and demonstrate it on a loan approval workflow that exercises all three agent types and hook-driven regulatory override. The process harness uniquely reconciles imperative requirements, realized through deterministic workflow execution that enforces structural compliance, with normative requirements, realized through policy-framed agentic autonomy invoked at designated control points wherever the process demands it.
Fabiana Fournier, Lior Limonad
Jun 24, 2026cs.LO

AXLE: A Cloud Infrastructure for Lean 4 Theorem Proving Utilities

We present AXLE (Axiom Lean Engine), a cloud service for Lean 4 proof manipulation, extraction, and verification. Recent progress in AI for mathematics -- reinforcement learning pipelines, agentic proving workflows, dataset curation -- demands Lean 4 tooling that scales to millions of requests while remaining correct and robust; existing infrastructure offers parallel compilation but not scalable proof verification, higher-level proof manipulation, multi-version support, or per-request isolation at the throughput modern AI workflows require. AXLE provides 14 Lean 4 metaprogramming tools spanning strict proof verification, declaration metadata extraction, semantic source manipulation, deterministic proof repair and simplification, and lemma extraction. The service runs as a multi-tenant cloud deployment with per-request isolation and concurrent support for multiple Lean 4 and Mathlib versions, accessible via a Python SDK, command-line interface, web UI, MCP server, and raw HTTP API. AXLE is publicly available and free to use at https://axle.axiommath.ai and via the axiom-axle PyPI package, with no local Lean 4 installation required. It has served over 500 million requests to date and is the underlying infrastructure for Axiom Math's proving efforts, including its 12/12 score on the 2025 Putnam competition.
Jimmy Xin, Alex Schneidman, Chris Cummins +3
Jun 23, 2026q-bio.GN

DeepBD: A Grounded Agentic Workflow for Variant Prioritization and Diagnosis of Genetic Birth Defects

Birth defects are a major cause of fetal loss, neonatal morbidity and long-term disability. In the subset with suspected genetic etiologies, exome and genome sequencing have moved many cases from variant detection to post-sequencing interpretation: clinicians must rank patient-specific candidate variants under incomplete fetal or infant phenotypes and heterogeneous evidence from population genetics, variant-effect prediction, gene-disease validity, phenotype ontologies, cellular and pathway context, protein structure and clinical literature. We present DeepBD, a grounded agentic workflow for variant prioritization and diagnostic interpretation of genetic birth defects. DeepBD organizes the workflow into LLM-assisted case structuring, a pretrained evidence engine, specialist evidence modules and a grounded diagnostic review layer. The evidence engine learns patient-specific variant scores from structured rule evidence, sequence and variant-effect representations and phenotype-conditioned biological context, whereas specialist modules and the agentic layer provide tool-based refinement, candidate-pool review and diagnosis-oriented synthesis from ranked candidates. Developed using an in-house fetal and infant cohort comprising 18,622 cases, DeepBD achieved Recall@1/3/5/10 of 0.658/0.882/0.912/0.929 on an internal held-out solved-case benchmark, outperforming standalone Exomiser, DeepRare and prompted LLM reranking baselines evaluated on Exomiser-derived top-20 candidate variants. Ablation and overlap analyses show that rule evidence, mechanistic context, and specialist refinement provide complementary signals. These findings support a grounded agentic workflow that separates evidence integration, tool-based refinement, and LLM-assisted diagnostic review for retrospective variant prioritization in genetic birth defects.
Shiyu Li, Ziqi Yan, Zhihao Wu +7
Jun 21, 2026cs.AI

VADAOrchestra: Neurosymbolic Orchestration of Adaptive Reasoning Workflows

Decision-making in real-world settings rarely follows a fixed script. Instead, it unfolds as a dynamic reasoning process in which the appropriate course of action evolves as new context and data become available. Traditional Business Process Management systems provide rigor, determinism, and auditability, yet they generally struggle to adapt their execution at runtime. Conversely, agentic systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) bring flexibility to decision-making, but they are inherently opaque, often unreliable, and suffer from significant scalability constraints when operating over large datasets. To combine these complementary paradigms, we introduce VADAOrchestra, a neurosymbolic framework that models complex workflows as evolving reasoning processes. The framework adopts a hybrid approach: given a user query and a collection of data sources, an LLM-based orchestrator incrementally plans and adapts the workflow. This is encoded as a logic program in a fragment of Datalog+/- where predicates correspond to tool invocations and rules represent both predefined domain dependencies and logic constructs synthesized on demand to manipulate intermediate results. All logical inference tasks are then executed by a state-of-the-art Datalog+/- symbolic engine. This approach provides a verifiable reasoning trace, supporting the auditability and reproducibility of the entire process. Furthermore, by decoupling high-level orchestration from symbolic inference, it addresses scalability concerns, enabling complex reasoning over large datasets through targeted data querying. We evaluate VADAOrchestra on real-world financial use cases, demonstrating faithfulness, scalability, and explainability compared to standard agentic architectures.
Teodoro Baldazzi, Luigi Bellomarini, Andrea Coletta +4
Jun 19, 2026cs.AI

Composing Verifiable Conceptual Models via Building Blocks: Towards Design-Time Verification of Agentic AI Workflows

Agentic AI systems orchestrate multiple LLM-based agents through workflow architectures that coordinate decisions, tools, and external actions. While current platforms emphasize runtime safeguards, little support exists for verifying workflows during system design. From a Modeling & Simulation perspective, this gap is analogous to composing conceptual models without verifying whether their building blocks interact coherently. We propose a design-time verification approach that models agentic workflows as compositions of reusable building blocks and checks their compatibility through twelve structural rules. We implemented these rules in a software prototype and evaluated them using two openly released datasets: 48 workflows with known design flaws and 168 variants that preserve workflow logic but alter graph structure. Results show that our verifier reliably detects violations even when flawed designs are obscured through structural transformations such as splitting tasks between agents. Future works could combine our verification with community repositories of building blocks to compose safe agentic workflows.
Noe Y. Flandre, Alexander C. Nwala, Philippe J. Giabbanelli
Jun 15, 2026cs.SE

Toward Self-Evolution-Ready Workflow Harnesses: A Reversible Migration Path and Convertibility Taxonomy for Expert LLM Pipelines

While expert-validated "LLM + script" workflows deliver significant value, they remain static: they encode hard-won domain knowledge yet fail to adapt execution based on feedback. Existing agent research predominantly targets greenfield agents and synthetic benchmarks, leaving the migration of active legacy workflows unresolved. To bridge this gap, we present a reversible, Strangler-Fig migration path that refactors legacy workflows into composable, typed, and auditable stages. Central to this framework is a three-tier convertibility taxonomy (A/B/C), implemented as a routing stage within the system harness, which diagnoses a workflow's readiness and routes it accordingly.
Yimo Lin, Zhen Zhang, Yibin Li
Jun 12, 2026cs.AI

Towards Direct Latent-Space Synthesis for Parallel Branches in LLM-Agent Workflows

Large language models increasingly serve as execution engines for agentic systems, yet they still consume context through a sequential text interface. This creates a mismatch with modern structured agent workflows, in which independent branches explore subtasks, retrieve evidence, or generate candidate solutions before a final synthesis step. Existing systems typically merge these branches by concatenating their textual outputs, which discards the parallel structure and incurs redundant prefill computation. In this work, we introduce Parallel-Synthesis, a plug-and-play framework that enables a synthesizer to directly consume the KV caches produced by parallel worker agents. Parallel-Synthesis combines a cache mapper that calibrates independently generated branch caches with a fine-tuned synthesizer adapter that enables generation from this non-sequential cache interface. We train Parallel-Synthesis using data that exposes the synthesizer to parallel cache contexts, teaches aggregation across cached branches, and distills reasoning behavior from standard text-concatenation-based synthesis. Across nine downstream datasets spanning math, science QA, code generation, GAIA, and multi-agent database diagnosis, Parallel-Synthesis matches or outperforms text-based synthesis on seven datasets and remains close on the other two. It also reduces time-to-first-token by 2.5x-11x, suggesting that direct cache-based synthesis is a promising interface for more native and efficient synthesis over parallel agent branches.
Shikun Liu, Mufei Li, Dongqi Fu +5
Jun 12, 2026cs.AI

Democratizing and accelerating AI-driven pathology research through agentic intelligence

Computational pathology has advanced rapidly with the emergence of foundation models, yet widespread adoption remains limited by substantial technical complexity and programming requirements. Here we present PathLab, an autonomous agentic framework that translates natural-language research objectives into executable and validated computational pathology workflows through the structured composition of domain-specific skills and tools. By organizing workflow generation around reusable methodological modules, including data preprocessing, model development, evaluation and interpretation, PathLab enables studies to be specified at the level of scientific intent rather than implementation details. We evaluated PathLab across 12 public datasets spanning four representative task families: region-of-interest classification, whole-slide image classification, segmentation and survival prediction. Across all task categories, PathLab achieved non-inferior performance relative to expert implementations, while consistently enforcing semantic validity of user prompts and proactively rejecting incompatible workflow specifications prior to execution. In controlled user studies, PathLab substantially reduced the time required to generate executable analytical pipelines and enabled domain experts without programming experience to independently design, execute and evaluate computational pathology studies. Together, these results establish PathLab as a reliable interface between biomedical intent and computational execution, enabling computational pathology studies to be designed at the level of scientific questions rather than programming expertise. By lowering technical barriers to advanced AI methodologies, PathLab provides a foundation for the broader democratization of computational pathology.
Jiabo Ma, Cheng Jin, Yihui Wang +19
Jun 12, 2026cs.DC

PLAIground: SLO-Driven Runtime Model Selection for Compound AI Systems in the Edge-Cloud-Space Continuum

Applications in the 3D Computing Continuum, which unifies edge, cloud, and space, require combining multiple AI tasks such as object detection, time-series analytics, and natural language processing into Compound AI systems. These systems must satisfy stringent Service Level Objectives (SLOs) on accuracy, latency, and cost. A key mechanism for maintaining SLO compliance of Compound AI systems is runtime model selection, where AI models are dynamically switched for each workflow task. However, existing distributed and compound AI frameworks do not natively support runtime model selection. We present PLAIground, a framework that enables runtime model selection for Compound AI systems. PLAIground introduces Compoundable AI Model (CAIM) abstraction, which decouples task semantics from AI model implementations via Task and Data Contracts, enabling model switching without workflow changes. Additionally, PLAIground introduces Pixie, an SLO-driven runtime model selection algorithm, which dynamically selects the most suitable model for each task during execution. Our evaluation on two realistic Compound AI workflows demonstrates that Pixie achieves up to 91.3% accuracy while maintaining SLO compliance where fixed-model strategies either violate cost and latency budgets up to 21x or miss accuracy targets by 4%.
Milos Gravara, Cynthia Marcelino, Andrija Stanisic +1
Jun 9, 2026cs.LG

FlowBank: Query-Adaptive Agentic Workflows Optimization through Precompute-and-Reuse

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.
Lingzhi Yuan, Chenghao Deng, Fangxu Yu +3
Jun 9, 2026econ.EM

Agentomics: Economic Foundations for the Valuation, Attribution, and Pricing of AI Agents in Human-AI Workflows

Agentic AI systems are increasingly being deployed as productive resources in organizational workflows, yet existing evaluation methods primarily measure isolated technical performance rather than economic contribution. This paper introduces \emph{Agentomics}, a workflow-based framework for valuing, attributing, and pricing human and artificial agents. The framework models a workflow as a configuration of heterogeneous agents whose collective performance determines gross value, deployment cost, reliability, and expected failure loss. Workflow value is treated as a team-level quantity that may include complementarities, substitution effects, bottlenecks, and nonlinear production; additive stage-level value is only a special case. Building on this workflow model, the paper formulates AI deployment as a coalition-formation problem and defines coalition value as the incremental net surplus generated relative to a benchmark human workflow. The Shapley value is then used to attribute economic surplus among participating AI agents, yielding a principled connection among valuation, accountability, and market pricing. The resulting Shapley pricing equilibrium provides a normative benchmark for assessing whether agent prices reflect expected marginal contribution. A security-operations case study illustrates how the framework accounts for productivity gains, deployment costs, reliability losses, and coalition-level complementarities in hybrid human--AI workflows.
Quanyan Zhu
Jun 5, 2026cs.DC

Cost-Aware Speculative Execution for LLM-Agent Workflows: An Integrated Five-Dimension Method

LLM-agent workflows chain model calls and tool invocations, and spend most of their wall-clock time waiting on upstream operations before downstream ones can start. Speculative execution can reclaim that idle time by launching a downstream operation with a predicted upstream input, but here each speculation costs real money (per-token billing) and its success probability is hard to estimate and drifts over time. This paper presents a method organized around five design decisions: (D1) start a downstream operation before its upstream completes; (D2) price each speculation in real dollars at separate input and output rates; (D3) expose a single operator dial for latency versus cost; (D4) decide via an expected-value rule with a failure-weighted cost term and a preference-adjusted threshold; and (D5) estimate the success probability with a Bayesian Beta-Binomial posterior whose prior is keyed to a dependency-type taxonomy. Variants of these ideas appear in recent work; the combination, with every decision logged in dollars, is what is new. The rule fires only on edges passing an admissibility precondition (side-effect-free, idempotent, or stageable behind a commit barrier), since a wrong speculation is rolled back by re-execution, which refunds tokens but cannot un-send an irreversible side effect. We specify the runtime mechanics, a closed-form result that the rule self-limits as the upstream branching factor grows, a five-stage calibration pipeline (offline replay, shadow, canary, online calibration, drift-triggered kill-switch), and a workload-fit rubric over eight production archetypes. Contrast tables against the four closest published systems (DSP, Speculative Actions v2, Sherlock, B-PASTE) show differentiators on every dimension, and a synthetic validation suite confirms the predicted decision boundary, probability threshold, posterior recovery, and streaming-cancellation behavior.
Faisal Fareed
Jun 5, 2026cs.AI

Workflow-to-Skill: Skill Creation via Routing-Workflow-Semantics-Attachments Decomposition

Large language model agents increasingly rely on Skills to encode procedural knowledge, yet high-quality Skills remain costly to hand-write. This paper studies automatic Skill construction from heterogeneous interaction evidence, including demonstrations, agent trajectories, tool traces, and execution logs. We argue that trace-to-skill construction is not simple summarization tasks, because traces are fragmented, redundant, and may miss rare but safety-critical behaviors. To address this, we introduce RWSA, a workflow-oriented intermediate representation that decomposes Skills into Workflow structure, execution Semantics, and runtime Attachments, capturing task decomposition, control flow, verification, safety, rollback, and state management. Building on RWSA, we propose W2S, a framework that segments traces, induces local Skill drafts, aligns shared structures, reconciles branches, and compresses redundancy while preserving evidence and confidence annotations. Experiments on 70 Skills show that W2S improves behavioral replay consistency by 10.5% over summarization- and prompting-based baselines, highlighting the need to treat traces as executable runtime specifications rather than compressible text.
Yuyang Zhang, Xinyuan Han, Xudong Jiang +1
Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

Lean4Agent: Formal Modeling and Verification for Agent Workflow and Trajectory

Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) to execute reliable multi-step workflows has become a central challenge in artificial intelligence. Despite recent advances in LLMs' agentic capabilities, most agent systems still lack formal methods for specifying, verifying, and debugging their workflow and execution trajectories. This challenge mirrors a long-standing problem in mathematics, where the ambiguity of natural languages (NLs) motivates the development of formal languages (FLs). Inspired by this paradigm, we propose Lean4Agent, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework that uses Lean4, a dependent-type FL to model and verify agent behavior. Lean4Agent launches FormalAgentLib, an extensible Lean4 library for formally modeling and verifying agent workflows' semantic consistency under explicit assumptions, and enabling localization of execution-time failures revealed by trajectories. Building on FormalAgentLib, we further develop LeanEvolve, which applies results in FormalAgentLib to revise workflows to enhance its capability. Extensive experiments on a hard problem subset of SWE-Bench-Verified and a subset of ELAIP-Bench across 5 leading LLMs indicate that the verification-passing workflows outperform the failing ones by an average of 11.94%, and LeanEvolve further improves SWE performance by 7.47% on average. Furthermore, Lean4Agent establishes a foundation for a new field of using expressive dependent-type FL to formally model and verify agent behavior.
Ruida Wang, Jerry Huang, Pengcheng Wang +3
Jun 1, 2026cs.CL

SkillHarm: Lifecycle-Aware Skill-Based Attacks via Automated Construction

Agent skills occupy a privileged position in the agent workflow, as agents are expected to implicitly follow and execute them, rendering third-party skills a vulnerable attack surface. Existing studies have revealed unsafe agent behaviors induced by skill-based attacks, but they primarily evaluate poisoned skills within a single task execution and enumerate harms through ad-hoc risk lists. To bridge these gaps, we introduce SkillHarm, a benchmark of skill-based attacks across the skill-use lifecycle, paired with a systematic taxonomy of skill-relevant risks. SkillHarm evaluates two attack scenarios: Fixed-Payload Poisoning (FPP), where a fixed poisoned skill package directly compromises any task session that invokes it, and Self-Mutating Poisoning (SMP), where an initially benign execution silently mutates persistent skill content, deferring harm until a subsequent reuse. It further defines 12 risk types based on the agent workflow component targeted by the harm: data pipelines, system environments, and agent autonomy. To instantiate these attacks at scale, we build AutoSkillHarm, an automated construction pipeline with coding agents driven by natural-language harnesses. The resulting benchmark contains 879 attack samples across 71 skills. Experiments show that current agents remain vulnerable with attack success rates up to 86.3% in FPP and 69.3% in SMP. Our analysis further reveals a latent risk: many apparent attack failures stem from the agent failing to engage with the poisoned file rather than genuine resistance, and current defenses still fail to reliably mitigate the threat.
Yuting Ning, Zhehao Zhang, Yash Kumar Lal +8
May 29, 2026cs.LG

CoMem: Context Management with A Decoupled Long-Context Model

Context management enables agentic models to solve long-horizon tasks through iterative summarization of previous interaction histories. However, this process typically incurs substantial decoding overhead for the extra summarization tokens, which significantly affect the end-to-end response latency at deployment. In this paper, we introduce CoMem, a novel framework that decouples memory management from the primary agent workflow, enabling these processes to execute in parallel. We propose a kk-step-off asynchronous pipeline that overlaps the memory model's summarization with the agent's inference, effectively masking the latency of context processing. To ensure robustness under this asynchronous setting, we introduce a reward-driven training strategy that aligns the memory model to capture sufficient statistics for the agent's decision-making. Theoretical analysis confirms that CoMem offers a superior efficiency-effectiveness trade-off compared to coupled architectures. Our extensive experimental results on SWE-Bench-Verified show that CoMem provides 1.4x latency improvements upon vanilla long-context solutions while preserving most of the performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these latency gains scale favorably with increased system throughput, offering a modular path forward for the independent optimization of agent reasoning and memory compression.
Yuwei Zhang, Chengyu Dong, Shuowei Jin +11
May 28, 2026cs.HC

From Prompts to Context: An Ontology-Driven Framework for Human-Generative AI Collaboration

Collaborations with Generative AI often begin with a short prompt and end with an opaque output, leaving implicit who was involved, what task was being pursued, which resources were used, and which constraints should have shaped the process. This limited contextual explicitness hinders trust, traceability, and accountability, particularly when Generative AI is embedded in information-intensive workflows such as search, querying, and profile management. This paper introduces From Prompts to Context, an ontology-driven framework for representing Human-Generative AI collaboration. Its core component, the Contextual Collaboration AI Ontology (CCAI), models key elements of collaboration - including tasks, agent roles, resources, and constraints - as a shared machine-interpretable vocabulary. By combining populated CCAI instances with SPARQL-based context retrieval in operational workflows, the framework turns otherwise ephemeral prompt-response interactions into structured and queryable collaboration traces linking prompts, outputs, and their surrounding context. The approach is illustrated through a case study involving a software development team building a competency-based education feature for viewing and updating learner competency profiles. The case study shows how the framework can support the representation and documentation of collaboration episodes across requirements analysis, design, implementation, and testing. Within this setting, the results indicate that explicit collaboration modelling helps make task context more explicit, improves the traceability of AI-generated contributions, and supports more transparent and accountable Human-Generative AI practices. We conclude by outlining design principles for future Human-Generative AI systems that emphasise not only output quality, but also the explicit representation of the collaborative context in which outputs are produced.
Ngoc Luyen Le, Marie-Hélène Abel, Bertrand Laforge
May 27, 2026astro-ph.IM

First head-to-head comparison of agentic AI applied to the analysis of simulated data of the Einstein Telescope

We report a comparison of two state-of-the-art agentic AI systems, Claude Code (Anthropic) and Codex (OpenAI), tasked with autonomously executing a simple end-to-end gravitational wave data analysis pipeline on a shared computing infrastructure without human intervention. The pipeline comprises power spectral density estimation from raw Einstein Telescope simulated noise, geometric template bank generation, matched filter recovery of 100 binary black hole signal injections, automated results generation, and large language model-assisted production of a manuscript formatted in the style of Physical Review D. Both agents received identical written specifications and identical compute resources. The experiment was run twice: a first run with unrealistically loud injections, and a second run with signals rescaled to a physically motivated SNR range. The scientific results converged in both runs. However, the agents exhibited substantially different behaviors and computational costs: Claude Code completed the pipeline in ~3.4 minutes with silent deviations from the specification, while Codex required ~16 minutes across explicit self-correcting restarts, including an unsolicited performance optimization of the matched filter inner loop. The autonomously generated manuscripts also diverged in length, details, and quality. In the second run, a subtle difference in the interpretation of the SNR range instruction led to a genuine scientific divergence: Claude Code silently reinterpreted the instructions, while Codex followed the specification literally. We discuss the implications of these behavioral differences, such as speed versus auditability, silent versus transparent error handling, instruction interpretation, and the criticality of intermediate data representations in multi-model pipelines, for the deployment of agentic AI in scientific computing workflows.
Gianluca Inguglia
May 27, 2026cs.AI

An LLM-Based Assistance System for Intuitive and Flexible Capability-Based Planning

In modern industry, dynamic environments and the complexity of modular and reconfigurable resources require automated planning of process sequences. Capability-based planning approaches address this by automatically generating plans from semantic knowledge models that describe resource functions in a machine-interpretable form. Their practical use, however, remains limited: solver feedback, especially in the case of unsatisfiability, is difficult to interpret, and the knowledge models require adaptation as operational conditions change or requests become infeasible. This paper presents a hybrid assistance system that augments an existing capability-based Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) planning approach with an Large Language Model (LLM)-based layer for natural-language interaction, explanation, and adaptation. Formal planning correctness remains with the symbolic planner, while the LLM layer handles natural-language access and flexible knowledge model adaptation under explicit Human-in-the-Loop (HitL) approval. The system decomposes into four components: Capability Grounding, Symbolic Planning, Result Interpretation, and Planning Adaptation, realized as a routed agentic workflow in which a central router delegates to five specialized agents. The system is evaluated on a modular production system across four scenario types. Of 23 test cases, 9 of 10 knowledge queries and all 4 satisfiable planning cases were handled correctly, 3 of 4 unsatisfiable cases produced concrete repair proposals, and all 5 adaptive planning scenarios resolved into satisfiable plans through iterative, user-approved knowledge model modifications. The findings confirm that combining formal planning with LLM-based assistance substantially improves accessibility and adaptability in industrial automation.
Luis Miguel Vieira da Silva, Nicolas König, Felix Gehlhoff
May 27, 2026cs.SE

Multi-Agent LLM-based Metamorphic Testing for REST APIs

As REST APIs become an increasingly significant part of software systems, their validation is becoming more critical. Hence, testing and uncovering underlying issues are of utmost importance for improving software quality. However, testing REST APIs is challenging mainly due to the difficulty of assessing whether the output of an API call is correct, i.e., the test oracle problem. Metamorphic testing is a specification-based testing approach for situations where correct outputs are unknown or not specified explicitly. To check the correctness of a system, relations between the different outputs are specified. We present ARMeta, a tool-supported approach that uses an LLM-based multi-agent workflow to support metamorphic testing of REST APIs documented with OpenAPI. The agentic workflow is used to identify metamorphic test scenarios and specify them in the Given-When-Then format. These scenarios are automatically implemented as executable tests and executed against the system under test. We evaluate ARMeta on two publicly available web applications that expose REST interfaces and compare its performance with a scenario-based testing baseline. The results show that ARMeta explores behaviors that serve as a complement to existing scenario-based testing approaches.
Shehroz Khan, Abdullah Mughees, Gaadha Sudheerbabu +2
May 27, 2026cs.AI

Harness-Bench: Measuring Harness Effects across Models in Realistic Agent Workflows

LLM agents are increasingly deployed as executable systems that use tools, modify workspaces, and produce concrete artifacts. In such workflows, performance depends not only on the base model, but also on the harness: the system layer that manages context, tools, state, constraints, permissions, tracing, and recovery. However, existing benchmarks typically abstract away execution, compare complete agent systems, or hold the harness fixed, making execution-layer variation difficult to study. We introduce Harness-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating configuration-level harness effects in realistic agent workflows. Harness-Bench evaluates representative harness configurations across multiple model backends under shared task environments, budgets, and evaluation protocols, while preserving each harness's native execution behavior. The benchmark contains 106 sandboxed offline tasks constructed from practical agent-use patterns and manually reviewed for realism, solvability, oracle-checkability, and integrity. Each run records final artifacts, execution traces, usage statistics, and validator outputs, enabling analysis beyond final completion. Across 5,194 execution trajectories, we observe substantial variation in completion, process quality, efficiency, and failure behavior across model-harness pairings. These results suggest that agent capability should be reported at the model-harness configuration level rather than attributed to the base model alone. Our analysis further identifies recurring execution-alignment failures, where plausible reasoning becomes decoupled from tool feedback, workspace state, evidence, or verifiable output contracts. Harness-Bench provides a reproducible foundation for diagnosing and improving reliable, efficient, and auditable agent execution stacks.
Yilun Yao, Xinyu Tan, Chao-Hsuan Liu +9
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Detect by Yourself: Self-Designing Agentic Workflows for Few-Shot Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph anomaly detection aims to identify anomaly nodes in attributed graphs and plays an important role in real-world applications. However, existing graph anomaly detection methods still face two key challenges: 1) fixed pipelines, which restrict their adaptability across different graph tasks under limited supervision; 2) weak evidence, which prevents them from explicitly incorporating contextual and structural anomaly signals into the detection process. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, self-designing agentic workflows for few-shot graph anomaly detection (SignGAD). Specifically, we propose a novel paradigm that reformulates graph anomaly detection task from training a fixed anomaly detector to designing task-conditioned detection workflows. By constructing detection workflows, SignGAD selects suitable graph encodings and detector designs to exploit task-specific anomaly evidence. Meanwhile, we introduce a guarded final refit strategy to refine the selected workflow by calibrating refit acceptance, enhancing reliability under limited supervision. Extensive experiments conducted on several real-world datasets demonstrate that SignGAD achieves strong performance against state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness on graph anomaly detection tasks.
Tairan Huang, Qiang Chen, Yili Wang +4
May 22, 2026cs.AI

When Planning Fails Despite Correct Execution: On Epistemic Calibration for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems can fail even when planned actions are executed correctly because agents may misjudge their knowledge when evaluating plan feasibility, a phenomenon we term epistemic miscalibration in planning. Unlike execution errors, epistemic miscalibration is latent during planning, as generated plans can remain self-consistent and executable without observable errors; the miscalibration is also dynamic, as new information can alter feasibility assessments, potentially obscuring past miscalibration signals and causing them to recur over time. To address this, we propose the Epistemic Planning Calibration Agentic Workflow (EPC-AW), which assesses whether plans remain supported under varying information conditions rather than directly verifying feasibility. EPC-AW employs Information-consistency-based Plan Selection, selecting plans whose evaluations are stable across agents, together with Consistency-guided Epistemic State Refinement to adapt calibration over time by leveraging past discrepancies to guide future planning. Experiments show that EPC-AW improves system-level success by an average of 9.75%.
Zehao Wang, Shilong Jin, Zhao Cao +1
May 21, 2026cs.AI

Compiling Agentic Workflows into LLM Weights: Near-Frontier Quality at Two Orders of Magnitude Less Cost

Agent orchestration frameworks have proliferated, collectively exceeding 290,000 GitHub stars across LangGraph, CrewAI, Google ADK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Semantic Kernel, Strands, and LlamaIndex. All follow the same pattern: an external orchestrator above the LLM, injecting instructions and routing decisions every turn. Recent work has shown this architecture is dominated for procedural tasks by simply providing the procedure in a frontier model's system prompt [Dennis et al., 2026a], at the cost of consuming the context window, requiring a frontier model for every conversation, and exposing proprietary procedures to third-party providers. Compiling the procedure into the weights of a small fine-tuned model -- creating a subterranean agent -- should resolve all of these concerns, and prior work (SimpleTOD, FireAct, SynTOD, WorkflowLLM, Agent Lumos) has shown the technique works. Yet developer adoption has overwhelmingly favored orchestration. We identify three perceived barriers and address each empirically across travel booking (14 nodes), Zoom support (14 nodes, product-specific knowledge), and insurance claims (55 nodes, 6 decision hubs).
Simon Dennis, Rivaan Patil, Kevin Shabahang +1
May 20, 2026cs.AI

Evaluating Temporal Semantic Caching and Workflow Optimization in Agentic Plan-Execute Pipelines

Industrial asset operations workflows are latency-sensitive because a single user query may require coordination over sensor data, work orders, failure modes, forecasting tools, and domain-specific agents. We evaluate this problem on AssetOpsBench (AOB), an industrial agent benchmark whose plan-execute pipeline exposes repeated overhead from tool discovery, LLM planning, MCP tool execution, and final summarization. Existing LLM caching techniques such as KV-cache reuse and embedding-based semantic caching were designed for chatbot serving and break down when output validity depends on time, asset, or sensor parameters. We propose two complementary optimization layers for AOB plan-execute pipelines: a temporal semantic cache and a set of MCP workflow optimizations combining disk-backed tool-discovery caching and dependency-aware parallel step execution. MCP workflow optimizations corresponded to a 1.67x speedup and reduced median end-to-end latency by about 40.0% while the temporal-cache benchmark achieved a median of 30.6x speedup on cache hits. Beyond the speedup, our results expose a concrete failure mode of pure semantic caching for parameter-rich industrial queries, providing a critical analysis of how caching choices interact with evaluation correctness in MCP-backed agent benchmarks.
Alimurtaza Mustafa Merchant, Krish Veera, Sajal Kumar Goyla +3
May 18, 2026cs.AI

PathoSage: Towards Multi-Source Evidence Adjudication in Pathology via Experience-Aware Agentic Workflow

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and agent workflows have shown strong promise for computational pathology, yet reliable patch-level reasoning remains challenging. End-to-end pathology MLLMs often hallucinate morphological features, while recent agentic systems usually merge tool outputs and retrieved knowledge into a shared context, making decisions vulnerable to conflicting evidence and context contamination. We propose PathoSage, a three-stage framework that explicitly separates knowledge retrieval, evidence collection, and evidence adjudication for patch-level pathology multimodal reasoning. Its core component, Structured Evidence Deliberation, independently evaluates heterogeneous evidence from tools, performs conflict analysis, and generates the final judgment in a fresh context to reduce anchoring bias. We further introduce a training-free Beta-Bernoulli experience system with continuous credit assignment to model long-term tool reliability and construct similarity-weighted priors for future tool use. Experiments show that PathoSage effectively mitigates VQA hallucinations and classifier disagreement, outperforming strong pathology MLLM and agentic baselines. Our results highlight explicit evidence adjudication and reliability-aware tool modeling as key ingredients for robust pathology agents.
Chengyang Zhang, Wenchuan Zhang, Bo Li +5
May 18, 2026cs.AI

Agents for Experiments, Experiments for Agents: A Design Grammar for AI-Enabled Experimental Science

AI systems are becoming active participants in organizational and knowledge work. They increasingly interact with humans, coordinate workflows, and operate in multi-agent arrangements. Understanding their effects therefore requires more than measuring output accuracy; it requires evidence about mechanisms, delegation, feedback, and control. Experiments remain central to this task, but they also face a recursive challenge: we need experiments for agents to study these arrangements, and we may need agents for experiments to help search the expanding space of possible designs. Yet experimental conditions for human-AI and agentic workflows are still largely specified in prose, making them difficult to compare, reuse, or audit. We frame this as a problem of workflow representation, traceability, and governance in AI-enabled knowledge production. We introduce SEED (Structural Encoding for Experimental Discovery), a framework that represents experimental conditions as typed actor-flow graphs. SEED supports three design functions: describing conditions as interaction structures, evaluating structural novelty relative to encoded prior designs, and generating candidate designs under feasibility and governance constraints. We report a lightweight empirical feasibility test that compares graph-blind and SEEDguided generation in a medical-triage design task. In this diagnostic contrast, SEED-guided candidate designs show clearer actor-flow changes, assumptions, and governance checks, supporting the feasibility of the grammar as a design aid. The commentary closes by identifying governance tensions around novelty, replication, validity, diversity of inquiry, and accountability.
Yingjie Zhang, Chun Feng, Weizhang Zhu +1
May 17, 2026cs.AI

GraphMind: From Operational Traces to Self-Evolving Workflow Automation

Complex operational workflows coordinating personnel, tools, and information are central to system operations, yet end-to-end automation remains challenging due to extensive human input requirements and limited ability to adapt over time. We present GraphMind, a system that constructs, executes, and evolves action-centric workflow graphs with minimal human effort. The system operates in three phases. First, a scalable offline pipeline extracts structured workflow graphs from large volumes of human resolution traces, capturing problems, actions, and their causal relationships. Second, an online multi-agent traversal engine navigates the graph to dynamically construct and execute workflows, combining graph-guided retrieval with LLM-driven reasoning at each step. Third, Adaptive Traversal Reinforcement (ATR) reinforces successful traversal paths, enabling execution-informed graph adaptation. GraphMind has been deployed across four production cloud database services for incident investigation. Evaluated on 93 held-out incidents and validated via blind expert review, the system outperforms an Agentic Summary-RAG baseline in mitigation reach, hallucination rate, and diagnostic throughput while requiring 8x less retrieval context. The ATR layer reduces hallucination rate by 26%, demonstrating that workflow graphs can learn from execution feedback. A 12-week field study confirms practical value: 97% of scored conversations yield actionable results within interactive latency.
Yiwen Zhu, Joyce Cahoon, Anna Pavlenko +13
May 17, 2026cs.AI

Towards trustworthy agentic AI: a comprehensive survey of safety, robustness, privacy, and system security

Agentic AI systems -- Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with planning, tool use, memory, and long-horizon interactions -- can execute complex tasks autonomously, but their multi-step trajectories introduce new failure modes that challenge trustworthiness. This survey provides a focused examination of trustworthy agentic AI through two core dimensions that are critical for high-risk deployments: Safety and Robustness, and Privacy and System Security. For each dimension, we clarify key concepts, identify where risks emerge along the agent workflow, and summarize stage-targeted mitigation strategies. Other trustworthiness aspects (value alignment, transparency, fairness, and accountability) are discussed as relevant context rather than parallel chapters. To support consistent comparison and deployment decisions, we consolidate evaluation into a unified metrics-and-benchmarks hub, emphasizing both outcome and process signals (e.g., constraint violations, trace completeness, and adversarial success rates) and offering scenario-to-metric guidance for release gating. We conclude by outlining open challenges such as self-evolving agents, runtime monitoring and verification, privacy-preserving personalization, and the trust-utility trade-off, and present a case study of real-world security failures in open-source agentic systems. Our goal is to serve as a practical reference for researchers and practitioners building trustworthy agentic systems in high-stakes environments.
Jinhu Qi, Muzhi Li, Jiahong Liu +9
May 14, 2026cs.AI

APWA: A Distributed Architecture for Parallelizable Agentic Workflows

Autonomous multi-agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in independently solving complex tasks in a wide breadth of application domains. However, these systems hit critical reasoning, coordination, and computational scaling bottlenecks as the size and complexity of their tasks grow. These limitations hinder multi-agent systems from achieving high-throughput processing for highly parallelizable tasks, despite the availability of parallel computing and reasoning primitives in the underlying LLMs. We introduce the Agent-Parallel Workload Architecture (APWA), a distributed multi-agent system architecture designed for the efficient processing of heavily parallelizable agentic workloads. APWA facilitates parallel execution by decomposing workflows into non-interfering subproblems that can be processed using independent resources without cross-communication. It supports heterogeneous data and parallel processing patterns, and it accommodates tasks from a wide breadth of domains. In our evaluation, we demonstrate that APWA can dynamically decompose complex queries into parallelizable workflows and scales on larger tasks in settings where prior systems fail completely.
Evan Rose, Tushin Mallick, Matthew D. Laws +2
May 14, 2026cs.AI

GraphFlow: An Architecture for Formally Verifiable Visual Workflows Enabling Reliable Agentic AI Automation

GraphFlow is a visual workflow system designed to improve the reliability of agentic AI automation in multi-step, mission-critical processes. In these workflows, small errors compound rapidly: under an idealized model of independent steps, a ten-step process with 90% per-step reliability completes successfully only 35% of the time. Existing workflow platforms provide durable execution and observability but offer few semantic correctness guarantees, while agentic systems plan at inference time, making behavior sensitive to prompt variation and difficult to audit. GraphFlow is designed to address this gap by treating workflow diagrams as the executable specification, a single artifact defining data scope, execution semantics, and monitoring. At compile time, a restricted class of diagrams is specified to produce reusable automations whose contracts (preconditions, postconditions, and composition obligations) are intended to be proof-checked before admission to a shared library. At runtime, a durable engine records outcomes in an append-only event log and can enforce contracts at system boundaries, supporting replay, retries, and audit. Swimlanes make trust boundaries explicit, separating verified logic from external systems, human judgment, and AI decisions. A year-long pilot across three clinical sites executed 8,728 cohort-enrolled workflow runs with a 97.08% completion rate under an early prototype without the verified-core subsystem; observed failures were localized primarily to external integrations. The formal semantics and proof-checked admission model described here are specified and under active development. Evaluation of the verified core is reserved for future work.
Drewry H. Morris, Luis Valles, Reza Hosseini Ghomi
May 14, 2026cs.AI

A Deterministic Agentic Workflow for HS Tariff Classification: Multi-Dimensional Rule Reasoning with Interpretable Decisions

Harmonized System (HS) tariff classification is a high-stakes, expert-level task in which a free-form product description must be mapped to a specific six- or eight-digit code under the General Interpretive Rules (GIR), section notes, chapter notes, and Explanatory Notes. The difficulty lies not in knowledge volume but in multi-dimensional rule reasoning: a correct classification must satisfy competing priority rules along several axes simultaneously, including material, form, function, essential character, the part-versus-whole boundary, and specific listing versus residual headings. End-to-end prompting of large language models fails characteristically by resolving one axis while ignoring the priority constraints on the others. We present a deterministic agentic workflow in contrast to self-planning agents: the control flow is fixed, language model calls are confined to narrow stages, and reflection and verification are retained as local mechanisms. This design yields interpretability by construction--each decision is decomposed into stage-wise structured outputs with verbatim citation of the chapter or section notes that bear on it. The architecture combines offline knowledge-engineering of the Chinese HS tariff with an online six-stage pipeline. Evaluated on HSCodeComp at the six-digit level, the workflow reaches 75.0% top-1 and 91.5% top-3 at four digits, and 64.2% top-1 and 78.3% top-3 at six digits with Qwen3.6-plus; an open-weight Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 backbone in non-thinking mode achieves 84.2% four-digit and 77.4% six-digit top-1 agreement with the frontier model. A two-stage manual audit of 226 six-digit disagreements suggests that a non-trivial fraction of HSCodeComp ground-truth labels may deviate from HS general rules; full adjudication records are released in the appendix as preliminary findings for community review.
Yu Zhang, Dongjiang Zhuang, Qu Zhou +4
May 14, 2026cs.LG

Lang2MLIP: End-to-End Language-to-Machine Learning Interatomic Potential Development with Autonomous Agentic Workflows

Developing machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) for complex materials systems remains challenging because it requires expertise in atomistic simulations, machine learning, and workflow design, as well as iterative active learning procedures. Existing automated pipelines typically assume a fixed sequence of stages or depend on domain experts, which limits their adaptability to heterogeneous materials systems where the optimal curriculum is not known in advance. To lower the barrier to developing MLIPs for non-experts, we propose Lang2MLIP, a multi-agent framework that takes natural-language input and formulates end-to-end MLIP development as a sequential decision-making problem solved by large language models (LLMs). At each step, a decision-making agent observes the current dataset, model, evaluation results, and execution log, and then automatically selects an appropriate action to improve the model. This removes the need for a predefined pipeline and enables the agent to self-correct by revisiting earlier subsystems when new failures arise. We evaluate this approach on a solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) system with multiple components and interfaces. These results suggest that LLM-based multi-agent systems are a promising direction for automating MLIP development and making it more accessible to non-experts.
Wenwen Li, Yuki Orimo, Nontawat Charoenphakdee
May 14, 2026cs.AI

Herculean: An Agentic Benchmark for Financial Intelligence

As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.
Xueqing Peng, Zhuohan Xie, Yupeng Cao +60
May 14, 2026cs.AI

Are Agents Ready to Teach? A Multi-Stage Benchmark for Real-World Teaching Workflows

Language agents are increasingly deployed in complex professional workflows, with tutoring emerging as a particularly high-stakes capability that remains largely unmeasured in existing benchmarks. Effective tutor agents require more than producing correct answers or executing accurate tool calls: a robust tutor must diagnose learner state, adapt support over time, make pedagogically justified decisions grounded in educational evidence, and execute interventions within realistic learning-management systems. We introduce EduAgentBench, a source-grounded benchmark for holistically evaluating tutor agents across the full scope of teaching work. It contains 150 quality-controlled tasks across three capability surfaces: professional pedagogical judgment, situated multi-turn tutoring, and Canvas-style teaching workflow completion. Tasks are constructed through a pedagogical-insight-driven pipeline and evaluated with complementary verification signals and human review. Across a comprehensive evaluation of frontier models, our findings reveal that current models are generally capable of bounded pedagogical judgment, but still fall short of professional teaching standards in situated tutoring and autonomous teaching-workflow execution. To our knowledge, EduAgentBench is the first theory-grounded and realistic benchmark for evaluating the holistic teaching capability of tutor agents, providing a measurement foundation for developing future tutor agents that can support realistic teaching work.
Zixin Chen, Peng Liu, Rui Sheng +6
May 13, 2026cs.CV

ProtoMedAgent: Multimodal Clinical Interpretability via Privacy-Aware Agentic Workflows

While interpretable prototype networks offer compelling case-based reasoning for clinical diagnostics, their raw continuous outputs lack the semantic structure required for medical documentation. Bridging this gap via standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) routinely triggers ``retrieval sycophancy,'' where Large Language Models (LLMs) hallucinate post-hoc rationalizations to align with visual predictions. We introduce ProtoMedAgent, a framework that formalizes multimodal clinical reporting as an iterative, zero-gradient test-time optimization problem over a strict neuro-symbolic bottleneck. Operating on a frozen prototype backbone, we distill latent visual and tabular features into a discrete semantic memory. Online generation is strictly constrained by exact set-theoretic differentials and a reflective Scribe-Critic loop, mathematically precluding unsupported narrative claims. To safely bound data disclosure, we introduce a semantic privacy gate governed by kk-anonymity and \ell-diversity. Evaluated on a 4,160-patient clinical cohort, ProtoMedAgent achieves 91.2% Comparison Set Faithfulness where it fundamentally outperforms standard RAG (46.2%). ProtoMedAgent additionally leverages a binding \ell-diversity phase transition to systematically reduce artifact-level membership inference risks by an absolute 9.8%.
Alvaro Lopez Pellicer, Plamen Angelov, Marwan Bukhari +3
May 13, 2026cs.AR

GenAI-Driven Approach to RISC-V Supply Chain Exploration

This paper presents an LLM-empowered workflow for RISC-V supply chain analysis, integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to enable comprehensive, multimodal data-driven insights. The proposed approach addresses the challenges of heterogeneous and unstructured supply chain data by leveraging LLMs for textual understanding and VLMs for extracting information from visual artifacts such as diagrams, tables, and scanned documents. These models collaboratively identify key entities and relationships, which are then organized into a knowledge graph representing supply chain components and their interdependencies. For analytical reasoning, the workflow incorporates MDE techniques and constraint-based modeling to enable formal validation of dependencies, detection of bottlenecks, and assessment of risks. The synergy between LLM- and VLM-based semantic understanding and MDE-based formal analysis supports both exploratory and systematic evaluation of supply chain resilience. A human-in-the-loop mechanism further enables interactive querying and expert validation. The approach is evaluated in RISC-V ecosystem scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness in generating actionable insights, enhancing transparency, and supporting decision-making in complex semiconductor supply chains.
Nenad Petrovic, Andre Schamschurko, Yingjie Xu +1
May 13, 2026stat.ML

When Should an AI Workflow Release? Always-Valid Inference for Black-Box Generate-Verify Systems

LLM-enabled AI workflows increasingly produce outputs through iterative generate-evaluate-revise loops. Each iteration can improve the candidate, but it also creates a release decision: when to stop and output the current result? This raises a statistical challenge because deployment-time evaluator scores are adaptively generated and repeatedly monitored, yet the likelihood models or exchangeability assumptions typically used for calibration are unavailable. We propose an always-valid release wrapper for existing generator-evaluator pipelines. The wrapper builds a hard-negative reference pool of high-scoring failures, calibrates deployment-time evaluator scores against this pool, and accumulates the resulting evidence with an e-process. This separates two roles: the reference pool turns black-box scores into conservative evidence, while the e-process provides validity under optional stopping. In theory, we show that a conservative reference pool yields finite-sample control of the probability of releasing on infeasible tasks, that is, tasks for which the given workflow is not capable of producing a reliable solution. We also characterize conditions under which the same conservative rule still achieves nontrivial release on feasible tasks. In an MBPP+ coding-agent case study, the wrapper reduces premature incorrect release relative to baseline stopping rules while still releasing on tasks for which the workflow repeatedly accumulates moderate supporting evidence.
Young Hyun Cho, Will Wei Sun
May 12, 2026q-bio.QM

Towards Discovery of Polymers for Insulin Delivery via Physics-Grounded Agentic Workflows

Cold-chain storage limits access to insulin for hundreds of millions of people; a thermally protective patch polymer could help, but the design space is too large for exhaustive experiment. Starting from that problem, we narrow to an agentic workflow: a large language model (LLM) calls physics-based tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), searching the discrete PSMILES space under a budget of OpenMM Packmol-matrix evaluations. The LLM acts as an implicit acquisition function conditioned on a persistent "discovery world": hypotheses, literature claims, and simulation outcomes updated each iteration. Under matched oracle budgets, the best autonomous campaign reaches an insulin-polymer interaction energy of -2263 kJ/mol, outperforming reinforcement-learning baselines by 68% and Bayesian optimization by 19%. Three independent campaigns converge on one structural motif (dense hydrogen-bond donors and acceptors per repeat unit) while physics checks reject infeasible packings and name-structure mismatches before they steer the next step. The science stage is CPU-bound and runs on commodity hardware. More broadly, the same architecture and workflow designed here applies to other protein-stabilization tasks whenever a tractable screening oracle is available.
Martins Otun
May 12, 2026cs.AI

ProfiliTable: Profiling-Driven Tabular Data Processing via Agentic Workflows

Table processing-including cleaning, transformation, augmentation, and matching-is a foundational yet error-prone stage in real-world data pipelines. While recent LLM-based approaches show promise for automating such tasks, they often struggle in practice due to ambiguous instructions, complex task structures, and the lack of structured feedback, resulting in syntactically correct but semantically flawed code. To address these challenges, we propose ProfiliTable, an autonomous multi-agent framework centered on dynamic profiling, which constructs and iteratively refines a unified execution context through interactive exploration, knowledge-augmented synthesis, and feedback-driven refinement. ProfiliTable integrates (i) a Profiler that performs ReAct-style data exploration to build semantic understanding, (ii) a Generator that retrieves curated operators to synthesize task-aware code, and (iii) an Evaluator-Summarizer loop that injects execution scores and diagnostic insights to enable closed-loop refinement. Extensive experiments on a diverse benchmark covering 18 tabular task types demonstrate that ProfiliTable consistently outperforms strong baselines, particularly in complex multi-step scenarios. These results highlight the critical role of dynamic profiling in reliably translating ambiguous user intents into robust and governance-compliant table transformations.
Wei Liu, Yang Gu, Xi Yan +5
May 11, 2026gr-qc

Discovery of Interpretable Surrogates via Agentic AI: Application to Gravitational Waves

Fast surrogate models for expensive simulations are now essential across the sciences, yet they typically operate as black boxes. We present \texttt{GWAgent}, a large language model (LLM)-based workflow that constructs interpretable analytic surrogates directly from simulation data. Surrogate modeling is well suited to agentic workflows because candidate models can be quantitatively validated against ground-truth simulations at each iteration. As a demonstration, we build a surrogate for gravitational waveforms from eccentric binary black hole mergers. We show that providing the agent with a physics-informed domain ansatz substantially improves output model accuracy. The resulting analytic surrogate attains a median Advanced LIGO mismatch of 6.9×1046.9\times10^{-4} together with an 8.4×\sim 8.4\times speedup in waveform evaluation, surpassing both symbolic regression and conventional machine learning baselines. Beyond producing an accurate model, the workflow identifies compact physical structure from the learned representation. As an astrophysical application, we use \texttt{GWAgent} to analyze the eccentricity of GW200129 and infer e20Hz=0.0990.044+0.063e_{20\mathrm{Hz}}=0.099^{+0.063}_{-0.044}. These results show that validation-constrained agentic workflows can produce accurate, fast, and interpretable surrogates for scientific simulations and inference.
Tousif Islam, Digvijay Wadekar, Tejaswi Venumadhav +4
May 11, 2026cs.CR

Comment and Control: Hijacking Agentic Workflows via Context-Grounded Evolution

Automation platforms such as GitHub Actions and n8n are increasingly adopting so-called agentic workflows, which integrate Large Language Model (LLM) agents for tasks such as code review and data synchronization. While bringing convenience for developers, this integration exposes a new risk: An adversary may control and craft certain inputs, such as GitHub issue comments, to manipulate the LLM agent for unwanted actions, such as credential exfiltration and arbitrary command execution. To our knowledge, no prior academic work has studied such a risk in agentic workflows. In this paper, we design the first detection and exploitation framework, called JAW, to hijack agentic workflows hosted on automation platforms via a novel approach called Context-Grounded Evolution. Our key idea is to evolve agentic workflow inputs under the contexts derived from hybrid program analysis for hijacking purposes. Specifically, JAW generates agentic workflow contexts through three analyses: (i) static path-feasibility analysis to identify feasible agent-invocation paths and the input constraints required to trigger them, (ii) dynamic prompt-provenance analysis to determine how that input is transformed and embedded into the LLM context, and (iii) capability analysis to identify the actions and restrictions available to the agent at runtime. Our evaluation of JAW on GitHub workflows and n8n templates showed that 4714 GitHub workflows and eight n8n templates can be successfully hijacked, for example, to leak user credentials. Our findings span 15 widely-used GitHub Actions, including official GitHub Actions for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen CLI, and Cursor CLI, and two official n8n nodes. We responsibly disclosed all findings to the affected vendors and received many acknowledgements, fixes, and bug bounties, notably from GitHub, Google, and Anthropic.
Neil Fendley, Zhengyu Liu, Aonan Guan +2
May 11, 2026cs.CR

Engineering Robustness into Personal Agents with the AI Workflow Store

The dominant paradigm for AI agents is an "on-the-fly" loop in which agents synthesize plans and execute actions within seconds or minutes in response to user prompts. We argue that this paradigm short-circuits disciplined software engineering (SE) processes -- iterative design, rigorous testing, adversarial evaluation, staged deployment, and more -- that have delivered the (relatively) reliable and secure systems we use today. By focusing on rapid, real-time synthesis, are AI agents effectively delivering users improvised prototypes rather than systems fit for high-stakes scenarios in which users may unwittingly apply them? This paper argues for the need to integrate rigorous SE processes into the agentic loop to produce production-grade, hardened, and deterministically-constrained agent workflows that substantially outperform the potentially brittle and vulnerable results of on-the-fly synthesis. Doing so may require extra compute and time, and if so, we must amortize the cost of rigor through reuse across a broad user community. We envision an AI Workflow Store that consists of hardened and reusable workflows that agents can invoke with far greater reliability and security than improvised tool chains. We outline the research challenges of this vision, which stem from a broader flexibility-robustness tension that we argue requires moving beyond the ``on-the-fly'' paradigm to navigate effectively.
Roxana Geambasu, Mariana Raykova, Pierre Tholoniat +3
May 7, 2026cs.LG

Efficient Serving for Dynamic Agent Workflows with Prediction-based KV-Cache Management

LLM-based workflows compose specialized agents to execute complex tasks, and these agents usually share substantial context, allowing KV-Cache reuse to save computation. Existing approaches either manage KV-Cache at agent level and fail to exploit the reuse opportunities within workflows, or manage cache at the workflow level but assume that each workflow calls a static sequence of agents. However, practical workflows are typically dynamic, where the sequence of invoked agents and thus induced cache reuse opportunities depend on the context of each task. To serve such dynamic workflows efficiently, we build a system dubbed PBKV (\textbf{P}rediction-\textbf{B}ased \textbf{KV}-Cache Management). For each workflow, PBKV predicts the agent invocations in several future steps by fusing the guidance from historical workflows and context of the target workflow. Based on the predictions, PBKV estimates the reuse potential of cache entries and keeps the high-potential entries in GPU memory. To be robust to prediction errors, PBKV utilizes the predictions conservatively during both cache eviction and prefetching. Experiments on three workflow benchmarks show that PBKV achieves up to 1.85×1.85\times speedup over LRU on dynamic workflows, and up to 1.26×1.26\times speedup over the SOTA baseline KVFlow on the static workflow.
Haoyu Zheng, Fangcheng Fu, Jia Wu +6
May 7, 2026cs.AI

On Time, Within Budget: Constraint-Driven Online Resource Allocation for Agentic Workflows

Agentic systems increasingly solve complex user requests by executing orchestrated workflows, where subtasks are assigned to specialized models or tools and coordinated according to their dependencies. While recent work improves agent efficiency by optimizing the performance--cost--latency frontier, real deployments often impose concrete requirements: a workflow must be completed within a specified budget and before a specified deadline. This shifts the goal from average efficiency optimization to maximizing the probability that the entire workflow completes successfully under explicit budget and deadline constraints. We study \emph{constraint-driven online resource allocation for agentic workflows}. Given a dependency-structured workflow and estimates of success rates and generation lengths for each subtask--model pair, the executor dynamically allocates models and parallel samples across simultaneously executable subtasks while managing the remaining budget and time. We formulate this setting as a finite-horizon stochastic online allocation problem and propose \emph{Monte Carlo Portfolio Planning} (MCPP), a lightweight closed-loop planner that directly estimates constrained completion probability through simulated workflow executions and replans after observed outcomes. Experiments on CodeFlow and ProofFlow demonstrate that MCPP consistently improves constrained completion probability over strong baselines across a wide range of budget--deadline constraints.
Xinglin Wang, Zishen Liu, Shaoxiong Feng +9
May 7, 2026cs.HC

PersonaTeaming: Supporting Persona-Driven Red-Teaming for Generative AI

Recent developments in AI safety research have called for red-teaming methods that effectively surface potential risks posed by generative AI models, with growing emphasis on how red-teamers' backgrounds and perspectives shape their strategies and the risks they uncover. While automated red-teaming approaches promise to complement human red-teaming through larger-scale exploration, existing automated approaches do not account for human identities and rarely incorporate human inputs. In this work, we explore persona-driven red-teaming to advance both automated red-teaming and human-AI collaboration. We first develop PersonaTeaming Workflow, which incorporates personas into the adversarial prompt generation process to explore a wider spectrum of adversarial strategies. Compared to RainbowPlus, a state-of-the-art automated red-teaming method, PersonaTeaming Workflow achieves higher attack success rates while maintaining prompt diversity. However, since automated personas only approximate real human perspectives, we further instantiate PersonaTeaming Workflow as PersonaTeaming Playground, a user-facing interface that enables red-teamers to author their own personas and collaborate with AI to mutate and refine prompts. In a user study with 11 industry practitioners, we found that PersonaTeaming Playground enabled diverse red-teaming strategies and outputs that practitioners perceived as useful, and that AI-generated suggestions in the PersonaTeaming Playground encouraged out-of-the-box thinking even when practitioners did not follow them strictly. Together, our work advances both automated and human-in-the-loop approaches to red-teaming, while shedding light on interaction patterns and design insights for supporting human-AI collaboration in generative AI red-teaming.
Wesley Hanwen Deng, Mingxi Yan, Sunnie S. Y. Kim +5
May 6, 2026cs.AI

From History to State: Constant-Context Skill Learning for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used to operate browsers, files, code and tools, making personal assistants a natural deployment target. Yet personal agents face a privacy-cost-capability tension: cloud models execute multi-step workflows well but expose sensitive intermediate context to external APIs, while local models preserve privacy but remain less reliable. Both settings also pay repeatedly for long skill prompts and growing histories. We propose constant-context skill learning, a context-to-weights framework for recurring agent workflows: reusable procedures are learned in lightweight task-family modules, while inference conditions only on the current observation and a compact state block. A deterministic tracker renders this state block from task progress and supplies aligned subgoal rewards, so each module can be trained with step-level SFT and refined through online RL. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld, our agents achieve strong performance across Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B and Llama-3.1-8B. With Qwen3-8B, SFT+RL reaches 89.6% unseen success on ALFWorld, 76.8% success on WebShop, and 66.4% unseen success on SciWorld. They match or exceed strong published agent-training results while reducing prompt tokens per turn by 2--7×\times relative to controlled ReAct prompting baselines, showing that procedural context can be moved from prompts into weights.
Haoyang Xie, Xinyuan Wang, Yancheng Wang +2
May 5, 2026cs.AI

From Intent to Execution: Composing Agentic Workflows with Agent Recommendation

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built using AI agents fulfill a variety of user intents that may be used to design and build a family of related applications. However, the creation of such MAS currently involves manual composition of the plan, manual selection of appropriate agents, and manual creation of execution graphs. This paper introduces a framework for the automated creation of multi-agent systems which replaces multiple manual steps with an automated framework. The proposed framework consists of software modules and a workflow to orchestrate the requisite task- specific application. The modules include: an LLM-derived planner, a set of tasks described in natural language, a dynamic call graph, an orchestrator for map agents to tasks, and an agent recommender that finds the most suitable agent(s) from local and global agent registries. The agent recommender uses a two-stage information retrieval (IR) system comprising a fast retriever and an LLM-based re-ranker. We implemented a series of experiments exploring the choice of embedders, re- rankers, agent description enrichment, and supervising critique agent. We benchmarked this system end-to-end, evaluating the combination of planning, agent selection, and task completion, with our proposed approach. Our experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the- art in terms of the recall rate and is more robust and scalable compared to previous approaches. The critique agent holistically reevaluates both agent and tool recommendations against the overall plan. We show that the inclusion of the critique agent further enhances the recall score, proving that the comprehensive review and revision of task-based agent selection is an essential step in building end-to-end multi-agent systems.
Kishan Athrey, Ramin Pishehvar, Brian Riordan +1
May 5, 2026cs.DC

A Workflow-Oriented Framework for Asynchronous Human-AI Collaboration in Hybrid and Compute-Intensive HPC Environments

Human involvement is critical in training and deploying AI systems in high-stakes defence and security contexts. However, real-time interaction is impractical in HPC environments due to compute intensity and resource constraints. We present a workflow framework that enables asynchronous human-AI collaboration across hybrid infrastructures, including HPC clusters, local machines, and cloud platforms. Workflows can pause at defined checkpoints for human input without halting underlying compute jobs, preventing idle resources and enabling non-blocking supervision. The framework supports interaction with SLURM-based scheduling, containerized and native tasks, and is customized for scenarios requiring human judgment and adaptability. We demonstrate its application in model training on systems like MareNostrum 5, highlighting benefits in portability, efficiency, and oversight in operational AI workflows.
Sergio Mendoza, Cedric Bhihe, Natalia Zamora +5
May 5, 2026cs.CY

An Ethical eValuation Agent (EeVA): Results of a Proof-of-Concept Test on a Prototype Agentic-like Workflow to Assist Ethical Deliberations

Ethical deliberation is often misunderstood as a search for single right or wrong answers, creating difficulties for non-ethically trained personnel who must address ethically laden challenges. We developed EeVA, an agentic-like LLM-based workflow designed to support comparative ethical reflection rather than deliver definitive ethical answers. EeVA was programmed in n8n using three interconnected workflows: starter, worker, and emitter. It evaluated uploaded use cases against 10 ethical frameworks through evaluator and synthesis prompts. Proof-of-concept testing used three published cases from urban mobility, peer-to-peer energy trading, and social-service resource allocation. Across all cases, EeVA produced consistently structured framework-specific evaluations and integrated syntheses. Outputs differentiated between frameworks, identified convergences and divergences, recommended modifications to increase alignment, and highlighted persistent ethical tensions. Syntheses were readable for non-specialists and shifted attention away from simplistic answers toward design conditions, safeguards, and areas where full cross-framework agreement was unlikely. The findings suggest that LLMs can be organised into usable workflows that preserve ethical plurality while helping bridge the communicative gap between ethicists and non-ethically trained personnel. EeVA's value lies not in replacing ethicists or resolving moral disagreement, but in scaffolding structured ethical deliberation. EeVA offers a promising proof of concept for supporting ethical reflection where access to ethics expertise is limited. Further work is needed on reproducibility, human evaluation, user testing, and efficiency before it can be considered a mature tool.
Stephen Milford, B. Zara Malgir, Miguel Vazquez
May 5, 2026cs.AI

GeoDecider: A Coarse-to-Fine Agentic Workflow for Explainable Lithology Classification

Lithology classification aims to infer subsurface rock types from well-logging signals, supporting downstream applications like reservoir characterization. Despite substantial progress, most existing methods still treat lithology classification as a single-pass classification task. In contrast, practical experts incorporate geological principles, external knowledge, and tool-use capabilities to perform accurate classification. In this work, we propose GeoDecider, a coarse-to-fine agentic workflow that enables accurate and explainable lithology classification through training-free use of large language models (LLMs). GeoDecider reformulates lithology classification as an expert-like structured process and organizes it into a multi-stage workflow involving coarse-to-fine reasoning. Specifically, GeoDecider includes the following stages: (1) base classifier-guided coarse classification, which uses a pre-trained classifier to provide a rough reference for downstream tasks, thus reducing the overall cost of downstream reasoning, (2) tool-augmented reasoning, which utilizes several tools such as contextual analysis and neighbor retrieval to achieve finer and more precise classifications, (3) geological refinement, which post-processes the final results to enforce geological consistency. Experiments on four benchmarks show that GeoDecider outperforms representative baselines. Further analysis demonstrates that the proposed framework produces geologically interpretable predictions while achieving a better trade-off between classification performance and inference efficiency.
Jiahao Wang, Mingyue Cheng, Yitong Zhou +4