LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

LLM: Large Language Model

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This field studies how to organize language models, tools, memory, and decision steps so agents can complete multi-step tasks effectively and efficiently. Approaches include fixed workflows and DAGs, query-level model routing, reinforcement learning and evolutionary search, and trace-guided prompt or harness refinement; they are tested in settings such as coding, web use, retrieval, and scientific research. Systems work also optimizes execution through caching, scheduling, parallelism, and compiling repeated behavior into deterministic workflows. A central tension is whether adaptive workflows improve on reusable fixed designs enough to justify their added cost and complexity, while maintaining reliability and generalizing beyond the tasks used for optimization.

Latest papers

262 papers59 papers in the last four weeks, up 69% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Apr 7, 2026

Spec Kit Agents: Context-Grounded Agentic Workflows

Spec-driven development (SDD) with AI coding agents provides a structured workflow, but agents often remain "context blind" in large, evolving repositories, leading to hallucinated APIs and architectural violations. We present Spec Kit Agents, a multi-agent SDD pipeline (with PM and developer roles) that adds phase-level, context-grounding hooks. Read-only probing hooks ground each stage (Specify, Plan, Tasks, Implement) in repository evidence, while validation hooks check intermediate artifacts against the environment. We evaluate 128 runs covering 32 features across five repositories. Context-grounding hooks improve judged quality by +0.15 on a 1-5 composite LLM-as-judge score (+3.0 percent of the full score; Wilcoxon signed-rank, p < 0.05) while maintaining 99.7-100 percent repository-level test compatibility. We further evaluate the framework on SWE-bench Lite, where augmentation hooks improve baseline by 1.7 percent, achieving 58.2 percent Pass@1.

Pardis Taghavi, Santosh Bhavani

Software Engineering AI Coding Agents Agentic Code Generation LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Apr 6, 2026

Compiled AI: Deterministic Code Generation for LLM-Based Workflow Automation

We study compiled AI, a paradigm in which large language models generate executable code artifacts during a compilation phase, after which workflows execute deterministically without further model invocation. This paradigm has antecedents in prior work on declarative pipeline optimization (DSPy) and hybrid neural-symbolic planning (LLM+P); our contribution is a systems-oriented study of its application to high-stakes enterprise workflows, with particular emphasis on healthcare settings where reliability and auditability are critical. By constraining generation to narrow business-logic functions embedded in validated templates, compiled AI trades runtime flexibility for predictability, auditability, cost efficiency, and reduced security exposure. We introduce (i) a system architecture for constrained LLM-based code generation, (ii) a four-stage generation-and-validation pipeline that converts probabilistic model output into production-ready code artifacts, and (iii) an evaluation framework measuring operational metrics including token amortization, determinism, reliability, security, and cost. We evaluate on two task types: function-calling (BFCL, n=400) and document intelligence (DocILE, n=5,680 invoices). On function-calling, compiled AI achieves 96% task completion with zero execution tokens, breaking even with runtime inference at approximately 17 transactions and reducing token consumption by 57x at 1,000 transactions. On document intelligence, our Code Factory variant matches Direct LLM on key field extraction (KILE: 80.0%) while achieving the highest line item recognition accuracy (LIR: 80.4%). Security evaluation across 135 test cases demonstrates 96.7% accuracy on prompt injection detection and 87.5% on static code safety analysis with zero false positives.

Geert Trooskens, Aaron Karlsberg, Anmol Sharma +6

XY.AI Labs, Palo Alto, CA · Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA · Cornell University, Ithaca, NY +3

Code Generation LLM Code Generation Workflow Automation LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Apr 5, 2026

Profile-Then-Reason: Bounded Semantic Complexity for Tool-Augmented Language Agents

Large language model agents that use external tools are often implemented through reactive execution, in which reasoning is repeatedly recomputed after each observation, increasing latency and sensitivity to error propagation. This work introduces Profile--Then--Reason (PTR), a bounded execution framework for structured tool-augmented reasoning, in which a language model first synthesizes an explicit workflow, deterministic or guarded operators execute that workflow, a verifier evaluates the resulting trace, and repair is invoked only when the original workflow is no longer reliable. A mathematical formulation is developed in which the full pipeline is expressed as a composition of profile, routing, execution, verification, repair, and reasoning operators; under bounded repair, the number of language-model calls is restricted to two in the nominal case and three in the worst case. Experiments against a ReAct baseline on six benchmarks and four language models show that PTR achieves the pairwise exact-match advantage in 16 of 24 configurations. The results indicate that PTR is particularly effective on retrieval-centered and decomposition-heavy tasks, whereas reactive execution remains preferable when success depends on substantial online adaptation.

Paulo Akira F. Enabe

Escola Politénica, University of São Paulo

Tool-Using Language Agents LLM Agents LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Efficient Language Model Reasoning LLM Agent Reliability

Apr 2, 2026

AeroTherm-GPT: A Verification-Centered LLM Framework for Thermal Protection System Engineering Workflows

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into hypersonic thermal protection system (TPS) design is bottlenecked by cascading constraint violations when generating executable simulation artifacts. General-purpose LLMs, treating generation as single-pass text completion, fail to satisfy the sequential, multi-gate constraints inherent in safety-critical engineering workflows. To address this, we propose AeroTherm-GPT, the first TPS-specialized LLM Agent, instantiated through a Constraint-Closed-Loop Generation (CCLG) framework. CCLG organizes TPS artifact generation as an iterative workflow comprising generation, validation, CDG-guided repair, execution, and audit. The Constraint Dependency Graph (CDG) encodes empirical co-resolution structure among constraint categories, directing repair toward upstream fault candidates based on lifecycle ordering priors and empirical co-resolution probabilities. This upstream-priority mechanism resolves multiple downstream violations per action, achieving a Root-Cause Fix Efficiency of 4.16 versus 1.76 for flat-checklist repair. Evaluated on HyTPS-Bench and validated against external benchmarks, AeroTherm-GPT achieves 88.7% End-to-End Success Rate (95% CI: 87.5-89.9), a gain of +12.5 pp over the matched non-CDG ablation baseline, without catastrophic forgetting on scientific reasoning and code generation tasks.

Chuhan Qiao, Jinglai Zheng, Jie Huang +3

School of Civil Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, 100044, China · Beijing Research Institute of Telemetry, Beijing, 100076, China

LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Constrained Generative Modeling Program Synthesis Code Generation

Apr 1, 2026

Experience as a Compass: Multi-agent RAG with Evolving Orchestration and Agent Prompts

Multi-agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), wherein each agent takes on a specific role, supports hard queries that require multiple steps and sources, or complex reasoning. Existing approaches, however, rely on static agent behaviors and fixed orchestration strategies, leading to brittle performance on diverse, multi-hop tasks. We identify two key limitations: the lack of continuously adaptive orchestration mechanisms and the absence of behavior-level learning for individual agents. To this end, we propose HERA, a hierarchical framework that jointly evolves multi-agent orchestration and role-specific agent prompts. At the global level, HERA optimizes query-specific agent topologies through reward-guided sampling and experience accumulation. At the local level, Role-Aware Prompt Evolution refines agent behaviors via credit assignment and dual-axes adaptation along operational and behavioral principles, enabling targeted, role-conditioned improvements. On six knowledge-intensive benchmarks, HERA achieves an average improvement of 38.69% over recent baselines while maintaining robust generalization and token efficiency. Topological analyses reveal emergent self-organization, where sparse exploration yields compact, high-utility multi-agent networks, demonstrating both efficient coordination and robust reasoning.

Sha Li, Naren Ramakrishnan

Virginia Tech

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Multi-Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Prompt Optimization Emergent Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems

Mar 30, 2026

Mimosa Framework: Toward Evolving Multi-Agent Systems for Scientific Research

Current Autonomous Scientific Research (ASR) systems, despite leveraging large language models (LLMs) and agentic architectures, remain constrained by fixed workflows and toolsets that prevent adaptation to evolving tasks and environments. We introduce Mimosa, an evolving multi-agent framework that automatically synthesizes task-specific multi-agent workflows and iteratively refines them through experimental feedback. Mimosa leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for dynamic tool discovery, generates workflow topologies via a meta-orchestrator, executes subtasks through code-generating agents that invoke available tools and scientific software libraries, and scores executions with an LLM-based judge whose feedback drives workflow refinement. On ScienceAgentBench, Mimosa achieves a success rate of 43.1% with DeepSeek-V3.2, surpassing both single-agent baselines and static multi-agent configurations. Our results further reveal that models respond heterogeneously to multi-agent decomposition and iterative learning, indicating that the benefits of workflow evolution depend on the capabilities of the underlying execution model. Beyond these benchmarks, Mimosa modular architecture and tool-agnostic design make it readily extensible, and its fully logged execution traces and archived workflows support auditability by preserving every analytical step for inspection and potential replication. Combined with domain-expert guidance, the framework has the potential to automate a broad range of computationally accessible scientific tasks across disciplines. Released as a fully open-source platform, Mimosa aims to provide an open foundation for community-driven ASR.

Martin Legrand, Tao Jiang, Matthieu Feraud +5

Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, ICN, Nice, France · Interdisciplinary Institute for Artificial Intelligence (3iA) Côte d’Azur, Sophia-Antipolis, France · Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, I3S, France

Autonomous Research Agents Multi-Agent Systems LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Multi-Agent Orchestration

Mar 28, 2026

Self-evolving AI agents for protein discovery and directed evolution

Protein scientific discovery is bottlenecked by the manual orchestration of information and algorithms, while general agents are insufficient in complex domain projects. VenusFactory2 provides an autonomous framework that shifts from static tool usage to dynamic workflow synthesis via a self-evolving multi-agent infrastructure to address protein-related demands. It outperforms a set of well-known agents on the VenusAgentEval benchmark, and autonomously organizes the discovery and optimization of proteins from a single natural language prompt.

Yang Tan, Lingrong Zhang, Mingchen Li +5

Shanghai National Center for Applied Mathematics (SJTU Center) & Institute of Natural Sciences, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China. · Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, 200231, China. · School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China. +1

Autonomous Research Agents Self-Evolving Agents LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Protein Design

Mar 28, 2026

Simulating Human Cognition: Heartbeat-Driven Autonomous Thinking Activity Scheduling for LLM-based AI systems

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use, yet they often suffer from rigid, reactive control flows that limit their adaptability and efficiency. Most existing frameworks rely on fixed pipelines or failure-triggered reflection, causing agents to act impulsively or correct errors only after they occur. In this paper, we introduce Heartbeat-Driven Autonomous Thinking Activity Scheduling, a mechanism that enables proactive, adaptive, and continuous self-regulation. Mirroring the natural rhythm of human cognition, our system employs a periodic ``heartbeat'' mechanism to orchestrate a dynamic repertoire of cognitive modules (e.g., Planner, Critic, Recaller, Dreamer). Unlike traditional approaches that rely on hard-coded symbolic rules or immediate reactive triggers, our scheduler learns to determine when to engage specific thinking activities -- such as recalling memories, summarizing experiences, or strategic planning -- based on temporal patterns and historical context. This functional approach allows cognitive modules to be dynamically added or removed without structural reengineering. Meanwhile, we propose a meta-learning strategy for continual policy adaptation, where the scheduler optimizes its cognitive strategy over time using historical interaction logs. Evaluation results demonstrate that our approach effectively learns to schedule cognitive activities based on historical data and can autonomously integrate new thinking modules.

Hong Su

School of Computer Science, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu, China

LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Cognitive Architectures for AI Agents Metacognition in Language Models Continual Learning for LLM Agents

Mar 27, 2026

AgentCollab: A Self-Evaluation-Driven Collaboration Paradigm for Efficient LLM Agents

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) perform complex tasks through long-horizon reasoning and tool interaction, where a fundamental trade-off arises between execution efficiency and reasoning robustness. Models at different capability-cost levels offer complementary advantages: lower-cost models enable fast execution but may struggle on difficult reasoning segments, while stronger models provide more robust reasoning at higher computational cost. We present AgentCollab, a self-driven collaborative inference framework that dynamically coordinates models with different reasoning capacities during agent execution. Instead of relying on external routing modules, the framework uses the agent's own self-reflection signal to determine whether the current reasoning trajectory is making meaningful progress, and escalates control to a stronger reasoning tier only when necessary. To further stabilize long-horizon execution, we introduce a difficulty-aware cumulative escalation strategy that allocates additional reasoning budget based on recent failure signals. In our experiments, we instantiate this framework using a two-level small-large model setting. Experiments on diverse multi-step agent benchmarks show that AgentCollab consistently improves the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier of LLM agents.

Wenbo Gao, Renxi Liu, Xian Wang +8

Huawei · Hong Kong Polytechnic University

LLM Agents LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Long-Horizon LLM Agents Inference-Time Compute Allocation

Mar 26, 2026

UCAgent: An End-to-End Agent for Block-Level Functional Verification

Functional verification remains a critical bottleneck in modern IC development cycles, accounting for approximately 70% of total development time in many projects. However, traditional methods, including constrained-random and formal verification, struggle to keep pace with the growing complexity of modern semiconductor designs. While recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in code generation and task automation, significant challenges hinder the realization of end-to-end functional verification automation. These challenges include (i) limited accuracy in generating Verilog/SystemVerilog verification code, (ii) the fragility of LLMs when executing complex, multi-step verification workflows, and (iii) the difficulty of maintaining verification consistency across specifications, coverage models, and test cases throughout the workflow. To address these challenges, we propose UCAgent, an end-to-end agent that automates hardware block-level functional verification based on three core mechanisms. First, we establish a pure Python verification environment using Picker and Toffee to avoid relying on LLM-generated SystemVerilog verification code. Second, we introduce a configurable 31-stage fine-grained verification workflow to guide the LLM, where each stage is verified by an automated checker. Furthermore, we propose a Verification Consistency Labeling Mechanism (VCLM) that assigns hierarchical labels to LLM-generated artifacts, improving the reliability and traceability of verification. Experimental results show that UCAgent can complete end-to-end automated verification on multiple modules, including the UART, FPU, and integer divider modules, achieving up to 98.5% code coverage and up to 100% functional coverage. UCAgent also discovers previously unidentified design defects in realistic designs, demonstrating its practical potential.

Junyue Wang, Zhicheng Yao, Yan Pi +6

State Key Lab of Processors, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Beijing Institute of Open Source Chip

LLM Agent Verification Automated Test Generation LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Mar 25, 2026

Supervising Ralph Wiggum: Exploring a Metacognitive Co-Regulation Agentic AI Loop for Engineering Design

The engineering design research community has studied agentic AI systems that use Large Language Model (LLM) agents to automate the engineering design process. However, these systems are prone to some of the same pathologies that plague humans. Just as human designers, LLM design agents can fixate on existing paradigms and fail to explore alternatives when solving design challenges, potentially leading to suboptimal solutions. In this work, we propose (1) a novel Self-Regulation Loop (SRL), in which the Design Agent self-regulates and explicitly monitors its own metacognition, and (2) a novel Co-Regulation Design Agentic Loop (CRDAL), in which a Metacognitive Co-Regulation Agent assists the Design Agent in metacognition to mitigate design fixation, thereby improving system performance for engineering design tasks. In the battery pack design problem examined here, we found that the novel SRL and CRDAL systems generate designs with better performance, without significantly increasing the computational cost, compared to a plain Ralph Wiggum Loop (RWL) Further, the novel CRDAL generates designs with significantly better performance than SRL. Also, we found that the CRDAL system navigated through the latent design space more effectively than both SRL and RWL. The proposed system architectures and findings of this work provide practical implications for future development of agentic AI systems for engineering design.

Zeda Xu, Nikolas Martelaro, Christopher McComb

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 · Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213 · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213

LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Metacognition in Language Models

Mar 23, 2026

From Static Templates to Dynamic Runtime Graphs: A Survey of Workflow Optimization for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM)-based systems are becoming increasingly popular for solving tasks by constructing executable workflows that interleave LLM calls, information retrieval, tool use, code execution, memory updates, and verification. This survey reviews recent methods for designing and optimizing such workflows, which we treat as agentic computation graphs (ACGs). We organize the literature based on when workflow structure is determined, where structure refers to which components or agents are present, how they depend on each other, and how information flows between them. This lens distinguishes static methods, which fix a reusable workflow scaffold before deployment, from dynamic methods, which select, generate, or revise the workflow for a particular run before or during execution. We further organize prior work along three dimensions: when structure is determined, what part of the workflow is optimized, and which evaluation signals guide optimization (e.g., task metrics, verifier signals, preferences, or trace-derived feedback). We also distinguish reusable workflow templates, run-specific realized graphs, and execution traces, separating reusable design choices from the structures actually deployed in a given run and from realized runtime behavior. Finally, we outline a structure-aware evaluation perspective that complements downstream task metrics with graph-level properties, execution cost, robustness, and structural variation across inputs. Our goal is to provide a clear vocabulary, a unified framework for positioning new methods, a more comparable view of existing body of literature, and a more reproducible evaluation standard for future work in workflow optimizations for LLM agents.

Ling Yue, Kushal Raj Bhandari, Ching-Yun Ko +6

Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180 USA · IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 USA · Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180 USA

LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Agentic Workflows LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Evaluation

Mar 23, 2026

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

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

\times

and improving task performance by 8.0-9.5 percentage points on average over competitive baselines including vLLM.

Kangqi Ni, Wenyue Hua, Xiaoxiang Shi +3

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill · Microsoft · Carnegie Mellon University +2

LLM Serving LLM Inference Scheduling LLM Agent Serving LLM Agent Workflow Optimization LLM Routing

Mar 22, 2026

LLM-Powered Workflow Optimization for Multidisciplinary Software Development: An Automotive Industry Case Study

Multidisciplinary Software Development (MSD) requires domain experts and developers to collaborate across incompatible formalisms and separate artifact sets. Today, even with AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, this process remains inefficient; individual coding tasks are semi-automated, but the workflow connecting domain knowledge to implementation is not. Developers and experts still lack a shared view, resulting in repeated coordination, clarification rounds, and error-prone handoffs. We address this gap through a graph-based workflow optimization approach that progressively replaces manual coordination with LLM-powered services, enabling incremental adoption without disrupting established practices. We evaluate our approach on spapi, a production in-vehicle API system at Volvo Group involving 192 endpoints, 420 properties, and 776 CAN signals across six functional domains. The automated workflow achieves 93.7% F1 score while reducing per-API development time from approximately 5 hours to under 7 minutes, saving an estimated 979 engineering hours. In production, the system received high satisfaction from both domain experts and developers, with all participants reporting full satisfaction with communication efficiency.

Shuai Wang, Yinan Yu, Earl Barr +1

Chalmers University of Technology Gothenburg, Sweden · University College London London, United Kingdom · Volvo Group Gothenburg, Sweden

Workflow Automation Software Engineering LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Mar 22, 2026

WorkflowGen:an adaptive workflow generation mechanism driven by trajectory experience

Large language model (LLM) agents often suffer from high reasoning overhead, excessive token consumption, unstable execution, and inability to reuse past experiences in complex tasks like business queries, tool use, and workflow orchestration. Traditional methods generate workflows from scratch for every query, leading to high cost, slow response, and poor robustness. We propose WorkflowGen, an adaptive, trajectory experience-driven framework for automatic workflow generation that reduces token usage and improves efficiency and success rate. Early in execution, WorkflowGen captures full trajectories and extracts reusable knowledge at both node and workflow levels, including error fingerprints, optimal tool mappings, parameter schemas, execution paths, and exception-avoidance strategies. It then employs a closed-loop mechanism that performs lightweight generation only on variable nodes via trajectory rewriting, experience updating, and template induction. A three-tier adaptive routing strategy dynamically selects among direct reuse, rewriting-based generation, and full initialization based on semantic similarity to historical queries. Without large annotated datasets, we qualitatively compare WorkflowGen against real-time planning, static single trajectory, and basic in-context learning baselines. Our method reduces token consumption by over 40 percent compared to real-time planning, improves success rate by 20 percent on medium-similarity queries through proactive error avoidance and adaptive fallback, and enhances deployability via modular, traceable experiences and cross-scenario adaptability. WorkflowGen achieves a practical balance of efficiency, robustness, and interpretability, addressing key limitations of existing approaches.

Ruocan Wei, Shufeng Wang, Ziwei Shi

China Telecom Cloud, Beijing, China

Agentic Workflows LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Mar 20, 2026

Utility-Guided Agent Orchestration for Efficient LLM Tool Use

Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents often face a fundamental tension between answer quality and execution cost. Fixed workflows are stable but inflexible, while free-form multi-step reasoning methods such as ReAct may improve task performance at the expense of excessive tool calls, longer trajectories, higher token consumption, and increased latency. In this paper, we study agent orchestration as an explicit decision problem rather than leaving it entirely to prompt-level behavior. We propose a utility-guided orchestration policy that selects among actions such as respond, retrieve, tool call, verify, and stop by balancing estimated gain, step cost, uncertainty, and redundancy. Our goal is not to claim universally best task performance, but to provide a controllable and analyzable policy framework for studying quality-cost trade-offs in tool-using LLM agents. Experiments across direct answering, threshold control, fixed workflows, ReAct, and several policy variants show that explicit orchestration signals substantially affect agent behavior. Additional analyses on cost definitions, workflow fairness, and redundancy control further demonstrate that lightweight utility design can provide a defensible and practical mechanism for agent control.

Boyan Liu, Gongming Zhao, Hongli Xu

University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China · Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China

LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Tool Use LLM Agent Workflow Optimization LLM Decision-Making

Mar 20, 2026

HyEvo: Self-Evolving Hybrid Agentic Workflows for Efficient Reasoning

Although agentic workflows have demonstrated strong potential for solving complex tasks, existing automated generation methods remain inefficient and underperform, as they rely on predefined operator libraries and homogeneous LLM-only workflows in which all task-level computation is performed through probabilistic inference. To address these limitations, we propose HyEvo, an automated workflow-generation framework that leverages heterogeneous atomic synthesis. HyEvo integrates probabilistic LLM nodes for semantic reasoning with deterministic code nodes for rule-based execution, offloading predictable operations from LLM inference and reducing inference cost and execution latency. To efficiently navigate the hybrid search space, HyEvo employs an LLM-driven multi-island evolutionary strategy with a reflect-then-generate mechanism, iteratively refining both workflow topology and node logic via execution feedback. Comprehensive experiments show that HyEvo consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse reasoning and coding benchmarks, while reducing inference cost and execution latency by up to 19

\times

and 16

\times

, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art open-source baseline.

Beibei Xu, Yutong Ye, Chuyun Shen +3

East China Normal University · Beihang University · Shanghai University of International Business and Economics +1

Agentic Workflows LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Efficient Language Model Reasoning LLM-Based Program Synthesis

Mar 17, 2026

Efficient LLM Serving for Agentic Workflows: A Data Systems Perspective

Agentic workflows are composed of sequences of interdependent Large Language Model (LLM) calls, and they have become a dominant workload in modern AI systems. These workflows exhibit extensive redundancy from overlapping prompts and intermediate results due to speculative and parallel exploration. Existing LLM serving systems, such as vLLM, focus on optimizing individual inference calls and overlook cross-call dependencies, leading to significant inefficiencies. This paper rethinks LLM and agent serving from a data systems perspective and introduces Helium, a workflow-aware serving framework that models agentic workloads as query plans and treats LLM invocations as first-class operators. Helium integrates proactive caching and cache-aware scheduling to maximize reuse across prompts, KV states, and workflows. Through these techniques, Helium bridges classic query optimization principles with LLM serving, achieving up to 1.56x speedup over state-of-the-art agent serving systems on various workloads. Our results demonstrate that end-to-end optimization across workflows is essential for scalable and efficient LLM-based agents.

Noppanat Wadlom, Junyi Shen, Yao Lu

National University of Singapore Singapore

LLM Serving LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Agentic Workflows LLM Inference Acceleration

Mar 16, 2026

POLCA: Stochastic Generative Optimization with LLM

Optimizing complex systems, ranging from LLM prompts to multi-turn agents, traditionally requires labor-intensive manual iteration. We formalize this challenge as a stochastic generative optimization problem where a generative language model acts as the optimizer, guided by numerical rewards and text feedback to discover the best system. We introduce Prioritized Optimization with Local Contextual Aggregation (POLCA), a scalable framework designed to handle stochasticity in optimization -- such as noisy feedback, sampling minibatches, and stochastic system behaviors -- while effectively managing the unconstrained expansion of solution space. POLCA maintains a priority queue to manage the exploration-exploitation tradeoff, systematically tracking candidate solutions and their evaluation histories. To enhance efficiency, we integrate an

\varepsilon

-Net mechanism to maintain parameter diversity and an LLM Summarizer to perform meta-learning across historical trials. We theoretically prove that POLCA converges to near-optimal candidate solutions under stochasticity. We evaluate our framework on diverse benchmarks, including

τ

-bench, HotpotQA (agent optimization), VeriBench (code translation) and KernelBench (CUDA kernel generation). Experimental results demonstrate that POLCA achieves robust, sample and time-efficient performance, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms in both deterministic and stochastic problems. The codebase for this work is publicly available at https://github.com/rlx-lab/POLCA.

Xuanfei Ren, Allen Nie, Tengyang Xie +1

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI · Google DeepMind, Mountain View, CA · Google Research, Kirkland, WA

Large Language Model-Guided Optimization Stochastic Optimization LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Mar 13, 2026

Orla: A Library for Serving LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

We introduce Orla, a library for constructing and running LLM-based agentic systems. Modern agentic applications consist of workflows that combine multiple LLM inference steps, tool calls, and heterogeneous infrastructure. Today, developers typically build these systems by manually composing orchestration code with LLM serving engines and tool execution logic. Orla provides a general abstraction that separates request execution from workflow-level policy. It acts as a serving layer above existing LLM inference engines: developers define workflows composed of stages, while Orla manages how those stages are mapped, executed, and coordinated across models and backends. It provides agent-level control through three mechanisms: a stage mapper, which assigns each stage to an appropriate model and backend; a workflow orchestrator, which schedules stages and manages their resources and context; and a memory manager, which manages inference state such as the KV cache across workflow boundaries. We demonstrate Orla with a customer support workflow that exercises many of its capabilities. We evaluate Orla on two datasets, showing that stage mapping improves latency and cost compared to a single-model vLLM baseline, while workflow-level cache management reduces time-to-first-token.

Rana Shahout, Hayder Tirmazi, Minlan Yu +1

Harvard University MA, USA · Boston University MA, USA

LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Serving LLM Inference Serving AI Agent Architecture Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Mar 13, 2026

NormCode Canvas: Making LLM Agentic Workflows Development Sustainable via Case-Based Reasoning

We present NormCode Canvas (v1.1.3), a deployed system realizing Case-Based Reasoning at two levels for multi-step LLM workflows. The foundation is NormCode, a semi-formal planning language whose compiler-verified scope rule ensures every execution checkpoint is a genuinely self-contained case -- eliminating the implicit shared state that makes retrieval unreliable and failure non-localizable in standard orchestration frameworks. Level 1 treats each checkpoint as a concrete case (suspended runtime); Fork implements retrieve-and-reuse, Value Override implements revision with automatic stale-boundary propagation. Level 2 treats each compiled plan as an abstract case; the compilation pipeline is itself a NormCode plan, enabling recursive case learning. Three structural properties follow: (C1) direct checkpoint inspection; (C2) pre-execution review via compiler-generated narrative; (C3) scope-bounded selective re-execution. Four deployed plans serve as structured evidence: PPT Generation produces presentation decks at ~40s per slide on commercial APIs; Code Assistant carries out multi-step software-engineering tasks spanning up to ten reasoning cycles; NC Compilations converts natural-language specifications into executable NormCode plans; and Canvas Assistant, when connected to an external AI code editor, automates plan debugging. Together these plans form a self-sustaining ecosystem in which plans produce, debug, and refine one another -- realizing cumulative case-based learning at system scale.

Xin Guan, Yunshan Li, Ze Wang

Psylens AI, China · Shenzhen University, China · University College London, United Kingdom

Agentic Workflows LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Planning LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Mar 13, 2026

Separating Intelligence from Execution: A Workflow Engine for the Model Context Protocol

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly interact with external systems through tool-calling protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP). In prevailing architectures, the agent must reason about every tool invocation in every session, consuming tokens proportional to the number of actions performed--even when the task has been solved before. We present the MCP Workflow Engine, a novel MCP-native orchestration layer that decouples intelligence (deciding what to do) from execution (carrying it out). An agent reasons once to produce a declarative workflow blueprint--a JSON document specifying a directed sequence of MCP tool calls with parameterized templates, loops, parallel branches, and data piping. Subsequent executions are triggered by a single run_workflow tool call, consuming one invocation's worth of tokens regardless of the blueprint's internal complexity. We formalize the MCP Mediator architectural pattern--an MCP server that simultaneously acts as a client to downstream MCP servers--and implement it in TypeScript against the MCP SDK. We evaluate the engine on a production-scale Kubernetes CMDB synchronization task spanning 67 orchestrated steps across 2 MCP servers, 38 namespaces, 13 worker nodes, and 22 distinct resource types. The engine reduces per-execution token cost by over 99%, completes the full cluster graph--comprising 1,200+ nodes and 2,800+ relationships across 20 relationship types--in under 45 seconds, and achieves deterministic, idempotent execution with zero agent involvement at run time.

Abhinav Singh Parmar

A Preprint

LLM Agent Tool Generation LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Tool-Using Language Agents Model Context Protocol

Mar 12, 2026

One Supervisor, Many Modalities: Adaptive Tool Orchestration for Autonomous Queries

We present an agentic AI framework for autonomous multimodal query processing that coordinates specialized tools across text, image, audio, video, and document modalities. A central Supervisor dynamically decomposes user queries, delegates subtasks to modality-appropriate tools (e.g., object detection, OCR, speech transcription), and synthesizes results through adaptive routing strategies rather than predetermined decision trees. For text-only queries, the framework uses learned routing via RouteLLM, while non-text paths use SLM-assisted modality decomposition. Evaluated on 2,847 queries across 15 task categories, our framework achieves 72% reduction in time-to-accurate-answer, 85% reduction in conversational rework, and 67% cost reduction compared to the matched hierarchical baseline while maintaining accuracy parity. These results demonstrate that intelligent centralized orchestration fundamentally improves multimodal AI deployment economics.

Mayank Saini, Arit Kumar Bishwas

PwC US

Multimodal Agents LLM Agent Orchestration Multimodal Tool Use LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Mar 10, 2026

EPOCH: An Agentic Protocol for Multi-Round System Optimization

Autonomous agents are increasingly used to improve prompts, code, and machine learning systems through iterative execution and feedback. Yet existing approaches are usually designed as task-specific optimization loops rather than as a unified protocol for establishing baselines and managing tracked multi-round self-improvement. We introduce EPOCH, an engineering protocol for multi-round system optimization in heterogeneous environments. EPOCH organizes optimization into two phases: baseline construction and iterative self-improvement. It further structures each round through role-constrained stages that separate planning, implementation, and evaluation, and standardizes execution through canonical command interfaces and round-level tracking. This design enables coordinated optimization across prompts, model configurations, code, and rule-based components while preserving stability, reproducibility, traceability, and integrity of evaluation. Empirical studies in various tasks illustrate the practicality of EPOCH for production-oriented autonomous improvement workflows.

Zhanlin Liu, Yitao Li, Munirathnam Srikanth

LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Self-Improving Agents Agent Harness Optimization

Mar 9, 2026

Ares: Adaptive Reasoning Effort Selection for Efficient LLM Agents

Modern agents powered by thinking LLMs achieve high accuracy through long chain-of-thought reasoning but incur substantial inference costs. While many LLMs now support configurable reasoning levels (e.g., high/medium/low), static strategies are often ineffective: using low-effort modes at every step leads to significant performance degradation, while random selection fails to preserve accuracy or provide meaningful cost reduction. However, agents should reserve high reasoning effort for difficult steps like navigating complex website structures, while using lower-effort modes for simpler steps like opening a target URL. In this paper, we propose Ares, a framework for per-step dynamic reasoning effort selection tailored for multi-step agent tasks. Ares employs a lightweight router to predict the lowest appropriate reasoning level for each step based on the interaction history. To train this router, we develop a data generation pipeline that identifies the minimum reasoning effort required for successful step completion. We then fine-tune the router to predict these levels, enabling plug-and-play integration for any LLM agents. We evaluate Ares on a diverse set of agent tasks, including TAU-Bench for tool use agents, BrowseComp-Plus for deep-research agents, and WebArena for web agents. Experimental results show that Ares reduces reasoning token usage by up to 52.7% compared to fixed high-effort reasoning, while introducing minimal degradation in task success rates.

Jingbo Yang, Bairu Hou, Wei Wei +2

Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara · Center for Advanced AI, Accenture

Efficient Language Model Reasoning LLM Inference Efficiency LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Mar 6, 2026

Evolving Medical Imaging Agents via Experience-driven Self-skill Discovery

Clinical image interpretation is inherently multi-step and tool-centric: clinicians iteratively combine visual evidence with patient context, quantify findings, and refine their decisions through a sequence of specialized procedures. While LLM-based agents promise to orchestrate such heterogeneous medical tools, existing systems treat tool sets and invocation strategies as static after deployment. This design is brittle under real-world domain shifts, across tasks, and evolving diagnostic requirements, where predefined tool chains frequently degrade and demand costly manual re-design. We propose MACRO, a self-evolving, experience-augmented medical agent that shifts from static tool composition to experience-driven tool discovery. From verified execution trajectories, the agent autonomously identifies recurring effective multi-step tool sequences, synthesizes them into reusable composite tools, and registers these as new high-level primitives that continuously expand its behavioral repertoire. A lightweight image-feature memory grounds tool selection in a visual-clinical context, while a GRPO-like training loop reinforces reliable invocation of discovered composites, enabling closed-loop self-improvement with minimal supervision. Extensive experiments across diverse medical imaging datasets and tasks demonstrate that autonomous composite tool discovery consistently improves multi-step orchestration accuracy and cross-domain generalization over strong baselines and recent state-of-the-art agentic methods, bridging the gap between brittle static tool use and adaptive, context-aware clinical AI assistance. Code will be available upon acceptance.

Lin Fan, Pengyu Dai, Zhipeng Deng +4

Southwest Jiaotong University, China · The University of Tokyo, Japan · RIKEN, Japan +2

Self-Evolving Agents LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agent Workflow Optimization RL for Tool Use

Mar 5, 2026

CodeScout: Contextual Problem Statement Enhancement for Software Agents

Current AI-powered code assistance tools often struggle with poorly-defined problem statements that lack sufficient task context and requirements specification. Recent analysis of software engineering agents reveals that failures on such underspecified requests are highly correlated with longer trajectories involving either over-exploration or repeated attempts at applying the same fix without proper evolution or testing, leading to suboptimal outcomes across software development tasks. We introduce CodeScout, a contextual query refinement approach that systematically converts underspecified user requests into comprehensive, actionable problem statements through lightweight pre-exploration of the target codebase. Our key innovation is demonstrating that structured analysis before task execution can supplement existing agentic capabilities without requiring any modifications to their underlying scaffolds. CodeScout performs targeted context scoping, conducts multi-perspective analysis examining potential fixes and exploration opportunities, then synthesizes these insights into enhanced problem statements with reproduction steps, expected behaviors, and targeted exploration hints. This pre-exploration directly addresses the identified failure patterns by reducing non-converging agent trajectories while clarifying user intent in natural language space. We evaluate CodeScout using state-of-the-art agentic scaffolds and language models on SWEBench-Verified, demonstrating a 20% improvement in resolution rates with up to 27 additional issues resolved compared to the default baseline method. Our results suggest that systematic query refinement through contextual analysis represents a promising direction for enhancing AI code assistance capabilities.

Manan Suri, Xiangci Li, Mehdi Shojaie +5

University of Maryland, College Park · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Databricks

Software Engineering Agents LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Mar 4, 2026

DOVA: Deliberation-First Multi-Agent Orchestration for Autonomous Research Automation

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tool use, reasoning, and code generation, yet single-agent systems exhibit fundamental limitations when confronted with complex research tasks demanding multi-source synthesis, adversarial verification, and personalized delivery. We present DOVA (Deep Orchestrated Versatile Agent), a multi-agent platform introducing three key innovations: (1) deliberation-first orchestration, where explicit meta-reasoning precedes tool invocation, informed by a persistent user model and entity-aware conversation context; (2) hybrid collaborative reasoning, a composable three-phase pipeline unifying ensemble diversity, blackboard transparency, and iterative refinement; and (3) adaptive multi-tiered thinking, a six-level token-budget allocation scheme that reduces inference cost by 40-60% on simple tasks while preserving deep reasoning capacity. We formalize the core algorithms, present an architectural ablation study across seven system configurations, and analyze the contribution of each component to answer confidence, source coverage, and token efficiency.

Aaron Shen, Alfred Shen

University of California, Berkeley, USA · Amazon Web Services, USA

Multi-Agent Orchestration Autonomous Research Agents Multi-Agent Reasoning LLM Agent Workflow Optimization Adaptive Computation

Mar 4, 2026

ChatNeuroSim: An LLM Agent Framework for Automated Compute-in-Memory Accelerator Deployment and Optimization

Compute-in-Memory (CIM) architectures have been widely studied for deep neural network (DNN) acceleration by reducing data transfer overhead between the memory and computing units. In conventional CIM design flows, system-level CIM simulators (such as NeuroSim) are leveraged for design space exploration (DSE) across different hardware configurations and DNN workloads. However, CIM designers need to invest substantial effort in interpreting simulator manuals and understanding complex parameter dependencies. Moreover, extensive design-simulation iterations are often required to identify optimal CIM configurations under hardware constraints. These challenges severely prolong the DSE cycle and hinder rapid CIM deployment. To address these challenges, this work proposes ChatNeuroSim, a large language model (LLM)-based agent framework for automated CIM accelerator deployment and optimization. ChatNeuroSim automates the entire CIM workflow, including task scheduling, request parsing and adjustment, parameter dependency checking, script generation, and simulation execution. It also integrates the proposed CIM optimizer using design space pruning, enabling rapid identification of optimal configurations for different DNN workloads. ChatNeuroSim is evaluated on extensive request-level testbenches and demonstrates correct simulation and optimization behavior, validating its effectiveness in automatic request parsing and task execution. Furthermore, the proposed design space pruning technique accelerates CIM optimization process compared to no-pruning baseline. In the case study optimizing Swin Transformer Tiny under 22 nm technology, the proposed CIM optimizer achieves a 0.42

\times

-0.79

\times

average runtime reduction compared to the same optimization algorithm without design space pruning.

Ming-Yen Lee, Shimeng Yu

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Compute-in-Memory Electronic Design Automation AI Accelerator Inference LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Mar 3, 2026

stratum: A System Infrastructure for Massive Agent-Centric ML Workloads

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) transform how machine learning (ML) pipelines are developed and evaluated. LLMs enable a new type of workload, agentic pipeline search, in which autonomous or semi-autonomous agents generate, validate, and optimize complete ML pipelines. These agents predominantly operate over popular Python ML libraries and exhibit highly exploratory behavior. This results in thousands of executions for data profiling, pipeline generation, and iterative refinement of pipeline stages. However, the existing Python-based ML ecosystem is built around libraries such as Pandas and scikit-learn, which are designed for human-centric, interactive, sequential workflows and remain constrained by Python's interpretive execution model, library-level isolation, and limited runtime support for executing large numbers of pipelines. Meanwhile, many high-performance ML systems proposed by the systems community either target narrow workload classes or require specialized programming models, which limits their integration with the Python ML ecosystem and makes them largely ill-suited for LLM-based agents. This growing mismatch exposes a fundamental systems challenge in supporting agentic pipeline search at scale. We therefore propose stratum, a unified system infrastructure that decouples pipeline execution from planning and reasoning during agentic pipeline search. Stratum integrates seamlessly with existing Python libraries, compiles batches of pipelines into optimized execution graphs, and efficiently executes them across heterogeneous backends, including a novel Rust-based runtime. We present stratum's architectural vision along with an early prototype, discuss key design decisions, and outline open challenges and research directions. Finally, preliminary experiments show that stratum can significantly speed up large-scale agentic pipeline search up to 16.6x.

Arnab Phani, Elias Strauss, Sebastian Schelter

BIFOLD & TU Berlin

LLM Agent Workflow Optimization