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Jul 30

Scaling Reproducibility: An AI-Assisted Workflow for Large-Scale Reanalysis

Reproducibility is central to research credibility, yet large-scale reanalysis of empricial data remains costly because replication packages vary widely in structure, software environment, and documentation. We develop and evaluate an agentic AI workflow that addresses this execution bottleneck while preserving scientific rigor. The system separates scientific reasoning from computational execution: researchers design fixed diagnostic templates, and the workflow automates the acquisition, harmonization, and execution of replication materials using pre-specified, version-controlled code. A structured knowledge layer records resolved failure patterns, enabling adaptation across heterogeneous studies while keeping each pipeline version transparent and stable. We evaluate this workflow on 92 instrumental variable (IV) studies, including 67 with manually verified reproducible 2SLS estimates and 25 newly published IV studies under identical criteria. For each paper, we analyze up to three two-stage least squares (2SLS) specifications, totaling 215. Across the 92 papers, the system achieves 87% end-to-end success overall. Conditional on accessible data and code, reproducibility is 100% at both the paper and specification levels. The framework substantially lowers the cost of executing established empirical protocols and can be adapted in empirical settings where analytic templates and norms of transparency are well established.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 17

From Specification to Execution: AI Assisted Scientific Workflow Management

Scientific workflow management systems (WMS) support scalable and reproducible execution of complex pipelines, but workflow design, implementation, and debugging remain largely manual and require significant expertise. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs) show promise for workflow generation from natural language, but often rely on direct code synthesis, which limits transparency, reproducibility, and integration with workflow systems. We present an AI-assisted approach to scientific workflow management that combines specification-driven workflow generation, automated debugging, and distributed execution. The method introduces a structured specification phase that separates workflow intent, design, and implementation, allowing validation prior to code generation. We also develop an LLM-based debugging agent that diagnoses and resolves failures across multiple system layers. To support distributed execution and user interaction, we integrate Pegasus, a widely used WMS, with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, providing a unified interface for workflow submission, monitoring, and control. We evaluate the approach using a federated learning workflow for medical imaging, chosen for its parallel, iterative, and dependency-intensive structure. The system generated and executed large-scale workflows with thousands of jobs, reduced debugging effort, and allowed non-expert users to construct workflows with expert-level design patterns. These results indicate that end-to-end AI-assisted workflow generation and execution is feasible, and point toward AI-driven platforms for managing the scientific workflow lifecycle.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 15

MASSW: A New Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for AI-Assisted Scientific Workflows

Scientific innovation relies on detailed workflows, which include critical steps such as analyzing literature, generating ideas, validating these ideas, interpreting results, and inspiring follow-up research. However, scientific publications that document these workflows are extensive and unstructured. This makes it difficult for both human researchers and AI systems to effectively navigate and explore the space of scientific innovation. To address this issue, we introduce MASSW, a comprehensive text dataset on Multi-Aspect Summarization of Scientific Workflows. MASSW includes more than 152,000 peer-reviewed publications from 17 leading computer science conferences spanning the past 50 years. Using Large Language Models (LLMs), we automatically extract five core aspects from these publications -- context, key idea, method, outcome, and projected impact -- which correspond to five key steps in the research workflow. These structured summaries facilitate a variety of downstream tasks and analyses. The quality of the LLM-extracted summaries is validated by comparing them with human annotations. We demonstrate the utility of MASSW through multiple novel machine-learning tasks that can be benchmarked using this new dataset, which make various types of predictions and recommendations along the scientific workflow. MASSW holds significant potential for researchers to create and benchmark new AI methods for optimizing scientific workflows and fostering scientific innovation in the field. Our dataset is openly available at https://github.com/xingjian-zhang/massw.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024

Test Coverage Analysis of Agentic Pull Requests

AI coding agents increasingly submit complete pull requests (PRs) with minimal human intervention, shifting software development from AI-assisted to autonomous workflows. As these agents become more prevalent, ensuring the code they generate is adequately tested, by existing tests or by tests the agents write, is critical to preventing regressions, yet little is known about testing in agentic PRs. To address this gap, we analyze 4882 agent-generated PRs from the AIDev dataset (532 Java and 4350 Python PRs) produced by five coding agents. We study (i) how often agents include test changes and (ii) how well covered are code changes by existing and agent-written tests. Agents include test changes in only 49.6% of PRs that change code under test files. Existing tests provide an incomplete safety net: they cover 61.5% of agents' changed executable lines in Java and only 27.0% in Python, where 64.8% of PRs have no changed line executed by any existing test. Agent-written tests improve coverage over existing tests, but only in a minority of PRs: 35.9% of Java and 22.5% of Python Code + Tests PRs show a coverage gain. Across both languages, error-handling constructs (e.g., try and catch blocks) are the most consistently under-tested, with miss rates reaching 86.0% in Java and 81.0% in Python. These findings motivate coverage-aware development practices, coverage feedback loops for coding agents, and evaluation benchmarks that measure test quality to better help agents reliably test their own code.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 19

AI-Assisted Competency Assessment from Egocentric Video in Simulation-Based Nursing Education

Assessing learner competency in clinical simulation requires expert observation that is time-intensive, difficult to scale, and subject to inter-rater variability. Vision-language models have emerged as a promising tool for understanding complex visual behavior. In this work, we investigate whether visual observations can provide educationally meaningful signals for competency assessment through a three-stage framework that (1) extracts action timelines from egocentric nursing simulation video using frozen visual encoders and few-shot learning, (2) derives sequence-level features and per-session recognition metrics, and (3) relates these to instructor-rated competency. Across 22 densely annotated sessions (3.8 hours, 493 actions), a frozen DINOv2 backbone with HMM Viterbi decoding achieves 57.4% MOF in leave-one-out 1-shot recognition. Surprisingly, we observe a negative trend between recognition accuracy and competency (rho = -0.524, p = 0.012 for mIoU), robust to six confound controls: more competent students produce diverse, harder-to-classify workflows, while simple sequence features show no such relationship. Per-item analysis identifies patient safety protocols and team communication as the expected behaviors most reflected in this pattern, and process model comparisons reveal that higher-competency students exhibit more protocol-consistent action transitions. These findings suggest that recognition accuracy may complement predicted action timelines as a pedagogically informative signal in automated competency assessment.

  • 7 authors
·
May 15

pAI-Econ-claude: A Gated Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Agent Architecture for AI-Assisted Economic Theory Development

In many social-science research tasks, such as economics, LLM-based agents must produce outputs for which no cheap, task-complete, machine-readable correctness signal exists. This creates a distinctive reliability problem for multi-agent systems: how should generation, critique, coordination, and human judgment be organized when no component can certify the final result? We address this problem through pAI-Econ-claude, a gated, human-in-the-loop multi-agent architecture for AI-assisted economic theory development. Agents coordinate through a shared workspace of inspectable intermediate records; specialized gates diagnose targeted failure modes and recommend loopbacks without certifying correctness; and human checkpoints retain authority over decisions that are costly to reverse. We evaluate the architecture on five matched economic-theory tasks against an ungated baseline. Two evaluators blinded to configuration agreed on all five pairwise rankings, preferring the gated architecture in four tasks and the baseline in one. Mean failure severity fell from 1.58 to 1.16, while overall usefulness rose from 2.60 to 3.10. The largest observed gain occurred when a reality check rejected a false market-structure premise and a proof review prompted revision of a false welfare claim. The negative case shows that scaffolding can also compress an economically important mechanism too aggressively. The results support a bounded claim: gated oversight improves the auditability of AI-assisted economic theory without substituting for formal verification, and the allocation of irreversible human judgment is a more informative design variable than pure agent autonomy. The workflow is publicly available at https://github.com/maxwell2732/pAI-Econ-claude.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 22

The SAGES Critical View of Safety Challenge: A Global Benchmark for AI-Assisted Surgical Quality Assessment

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for surgical quality assessment promise to democratize access to expertise, with applications in training, guidance, and accreditation. This study presents the SAGES Critical View of Safety (CVS) Challenge, the first AI competition organized by a surgical society, using the CVS in laparoscopic cholecystectomy, a universally recommended yet inconsistently performed safety step, as an exemplar of surgical quality assessment. A global collaboration across 54 institutions in 24 countries engaged hundreds of clinicians and engineers to curate 1,000 videos annotated by 20 surgical experts according to a consensus-validated protocol. The challenge addressed key barriers to real-world deployment in surgery, including achieving high performance, capturing uncertainty in subjective assessment, and ensuring robustness to clinical variability. To enable this scale of effort, we developed EndoGlacier, a framework for managing large, heterogeneous surgical video and multi-annotator workflows. Thirteen international teams participated, achieving up to a 17\% relative gain in assessment performance, over 80\% reduction in calibration error, and a 17\% relative improvement in robustness over the state-of-the-art. Analysis of results highlighted methodological trends linked to model performance, providing guidance for future research toward robust, clinically deployable AI for surgical quality assessment.

  • 16 authors
·
Sep 21, 2025

Programming by Chat: A Large-Scale Behavioral Analysis of 11,579 Real-World AI-Assisted IDE Sessions

IDE-integrated AI coding assistants, which operate conversationally within developers' working codebases with access to project context and multi-file editing, are rapidly reshaping software development. However, empirical investigation of this shift remains limited: existing studies largely rely on small-scale, controlled settings or analyze general-purpose chatbots rather than codebase-aware IDE workflows. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first large-scale study of real-world conversational programming in IDE-native settings, analyzing 74,998 developer messages from 11,579 chat sessions across 1,300 repositories and 899 developers using Cursor and GitHub Copilot. These chats were committed to public repositories as part of routine development, capturing in-the-wild behavior. Our findings reveal three shifts in how programming work is organized: conversational programming operates as progressive specification, with developers iteratively refining outputs rather than specifying complete tasks upfront; developers redistribute cognitive work to AI, delegating diagnosis, comprehension, and validation rather than engaging with code and outputs directly; and developers actively manage the collaboration, externalizing plans into persistent artifacts, and negotiating AI autonomy through context injection and behavioral constraints. These results provide foundational empirical insights into AI-assisted development and offer implications for the design of future programming environments.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 31

ESAA-Security: An Event-Sourced, Verifiable Architecture for Agent-Assisted Security Audits of AI-Generated Code

AI-assisted software generation has increased development speed, but it has also amplified a persistent engineering problem: systems that are functionally correct may still be structurally insecure. In practice, prompt-based security review with large language models often suffers from uneven coverage, weak reproducibility, unsupported findings, and the absence of an immutable audit trail. The ESAA architecture addresses a related governance problem in agentic software engineering by separating heuristic agent cognition from deterministic state mutation through append-only events, constrained outputs, and replay-based verification. This paper presents ESAA-Security, a domain-specific specialization of ESAA for agent-assisted security auditing of software repositories, with particular emphasis on AI-generated or AI-modified code. ESAA-Security structures auditing as a governed execution pipeline with four phases reconnaissance, domain audit execution, risk classification, and final reporting and operationalizes the workflow into 26 tasks, 16 security domains, and 95 executable checks. The framework produces structured check results, vulnerability inventories, severity classifications, risk matrices, remediation guidance, executive summaries, and a final markdown/JSON audit report. The central idea is that security review should not be modeled as a free-form conversation with an LLM, but as an evidence-oriented audit process governed by contracts and events. In ESAA-Security, agents emit structured intentions under constrained protocols; the orchestrator validates them, persists accepted outputs to an append-only log, reprojects derived views, and verifies consistency through replay and hashing. The result is a traceable, reproducible, and risk-oriented audit architecture whose final report is auditable by construction.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 5

A Practical Guide to Agentic AI Transition in Organizations

Agentic AI represents a significant shift in how intelligence is applied within organizations, moving beyond AI-assisted tools toward autonomous systems capable of reasoning, decision-making, and coordinated action across workflows. As these systems mature, they have the potential to automate a substantial share of manual organizational processes, fundamentally reshaping how work is designed, executed, and governed. Although many organizations have adopted AI to improve productivity, most implementations remain limited to isolated use cases and human-centered, tool-driven workflows. Despite increasing awareness of agentic AI's strategic importance, engineering teams and organizational leaders often lack clear guidance on how to operationalize it effectively. Key challenges include an overreliance on traditional software engineering practices, limited integration of business-domain knowledge, unclear ownership of AI-driven workflows, and the absence of sustainable human-AI collaboration models. Consequently, organizations struggle to move beyond experimentation, scale agentic systems, and align them with tangible business value. Drawing on practical experience in designing and deploying agentic AI workflows across multiple organizations and business domains, this paper proposes a pragmatic framework for transitioning organizational functions from manual processes to automated agentic AI systems. The framework emphasizes domain-driven use case identification, systematic delegation of tasks to AI agents, AI-assisted construction of agentic workflows, and small, AI-augmented teams working closely with business stakeholders. Central to the approach is a human-in-the-loop operating model in which individuals act as orchestrators of multiple AI agents, enabling scalable automation while maintaining oversight, adaptability, and organizational control.

  • 17 authors
·
Jan 26

OphNet: A Large-Scale Video Benchmark for Ophthalmic Surgical Workflow Understanding

Surgical scene perception via videos are critical for advancing robotic surgery, telesurgery, and AI-assisted surgery, particularly in ophthalmology. However, the scarcity of diverse and richly annotated video datasets has hindered the development of intelligent systems for surgical workflow analysis. Existing datasets for surgical workflow analysis, which typically face challenges such as small scale, a lack of diversity in surgery and phase categories, and the absence of time-localized annotations, limit the requirements for action understanding and model generalization validation in complex and diverse real-world surgical scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce OphNet, a large-scale, expert-annotated video benchmark for ophthalmic surgical workflow understanding. OphNet features: 1) A diverse collection of 2,278 surgical videos spanning 66 types of cataract, glaucoma, and corneal surgeries, with detailed annotations for 102 unique surgical phases and 150 granular operations; 2) It offers sequential and hierarchical annotations for each surgery, phase, and operation, enabling comprehensive understanding and improved interpretability; 3) Moreover, OphNet provides time-localized annotations, facilitating temporal localization and prediction tasks within surgical workflows. With approximately 205 hours of surgical videos, OphNet is about 20 times larger than the largest existing surgical workflow analysis benchmark. Our dataset and code have been made available at: https://github.com/minghu0830/OphNet-benchmark.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 11, 2024

LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces

Recent advances in AI-assisted programming have empowered agents to execute complex workflows via command-line interfaces, however, existing benchmarks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics, fail to rigorously evaluate the long-horizon planning and execution capabilities essential for realistic software engineering. To address these gaps, we introduce LongCLI-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon, realistic tasks. We curated 20 high-quality, long-horizon tasks from over 1,000 computer science assignments and real-world workflows, covering four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. We propose a dual-set testing protocol for LongCLI-Bench, which measures requirement fulfillment (fail-to-pass) and regression avoidance (pass-to-pass), and incorporates step-level scoring to pinpoint execution failures. Extensive experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art agents achieve pass rates below 20% in LongCLI-Bench. Step-level analysis further indicates that the majority of tasks stall at less than 30% completion, highlighting that critical failures often occur in the early stages. Although self-correction offers marginal gains, human-agent collaboration through plan injection and interactive guidance yields significantly higher improvements. These results highlight that future research must emphasize the development of synergistic human-agent workflows alongside advances in agents' planning and execution capabilities to overcome key challenges in long-horizon task performance.

  • 19 authors
·
Feb 15 3

Artificial Intelligence for Mathematical Reasoning: An Integrated Survey of Language Models, Neuro-symbolic Systems, and Verified Discovery

Mathematical reasoning has long served as a stringent test of machine intelligence; over the past decade, it has moved from a niche problem within NLP to one of the most consequential AI frontiers. This survey provides a unified account of the field's evolution, from early rule-based math word problem (MWP) solvers and template-driven geometry systems, through neural expression generation and LLM prompting, to contemporary reasoning models, multi-agent systems, neuro-symbolic theorem provers, and verified discovery workflows. We organize the landscape along four axes: (i) informal reasoning over text and diagrams, spanning MWP solving, multimodal geometry, and VLMs; (ii) formal reasoning in proof assistants, including autoformalization, tactic prediction, compiler-guided repair, and proof search; (iii) mathematical discovery, where systems propose constructions, improve bounds, or assist attacks on open problems; and (iv) the inference and training-time techniques, including CoT prompting, tool use, process reward models, and RLVR, that increasingly connect generation with verification. We catalog major benchmarks across grade-school arithmetic, competition mathematics, geometry, formal proving, multimodal and multilingual reasoning, and expert evaluation, and we examine benchmark saturation, contamination, reporting mismatches, and the distinction between pass@1, majority voting, and verifier-assisted pass@k. We critically assess failure modes: brittleness under perturbation, reward hacking, multimodal grounding failures, fragile formalization, and the energy cost of reasoning-scale inference. Drawing on recent perspectives from working mathematicians, we identify future directions centered on verified-discovery workflows, reasoning efficiency, and infrastructure to make AI-assisted formalization broadly usable. Companion materials: https://github.com/Starscream-11813/awesome-AI4Math.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 6

DPO-F+: Aligning Code Repair Feedback with Developers' Preferences

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to software engineering tasks, especially code repair. However, developers often struggle to interpret model outputs, limiting effective human-AI teaming. Prior work largely optimizes repaired code while under-addressing the natural-language feedback that enables comprehension and iterative improvement. We present DPO-f+, a novel framework that aligns code-repair feedback with developer needs and profiles. It (1) formalizes developer-profiled, domain-specific metrics for feedback alignment; (2) automatically constructs pairwise preference datasets from code-repair tasks; (3) fine-tunes using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) augmented with a lightweight margin signal; and (4) provides an automated feedback evaluation protocol. Empirically, DPO-f+ outperforms both the baseline and standard DPO on generated-code accuracy and overall feedback alignment. On novice programming tasks, DPO-f+ raises the top-1 pass rate by 5.71 percentage points (pp) over the baseline and by 3.30 pp over DPO. On the more challenging SWE-bench Lite benchmark, it increases the issue-resolution rate by 1.67 pp over DPO and by 4.67 pp over the baseline. It also achieves the largest improvement in feedback alignment, outperforming DPO and the baseline. By aligning feedback more closely with developer needs, DPO-f+ turns LLM-assisted repair from one-shot outputs into a collaborative sensemaking workflow, providing a practical approach to enhancing code comprehension and fostering more effective human-AI teaming in software engineering.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 1, 2025

(P)rior(D)yna(F)low: A Priori Dynamic Workflow Construction via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Recent studies have shown that carefully designed workflows coordinating large language models(LLMs) significantly enhance task-solving capabilities compared to using a single model. While an increasing number of works focus on autonomous workflow construction, most existing approaches rely solely on historical experience, leading to limitations in efficiency and adaptability. We argue that while historical experience is valuable, workflow construction should also flexibly respond to the unique characteristics of each task. To this end, we propose an a priori dynamic framework for automated workflow construction. Our framework first leverages Q-table learning to optimize the decision space, guiding agent decisions and enabling effective use of historical experience. At the same time, agents evaluate the current task progress and make a priori decisions regarding the next executing agent, allowing the system to proactively select the more suitable workflow structure for each given task. Additionally, we incorporate mechanisms such as cold-start initialization, early stopping, and pruning to further improve system efficiency. Experimental evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, our method achieves an average improvement of 4.05%, while reducing workflow construction and inference costs to only 30.68%-48.31% of those required by existing methods.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025

Automating the Enterprise with Foundation Models

Automating enterprise workflows could unlock $4 trillion/year in productivity gains. Despite being of interest to the data management community for decades, the ultimate vision of end-to-end workflow automation has remained elusive. Current solutions rely on process mining and robotic process automation (RPA), in which a bot is hard-coded to follow a set of predefined rules for completing a workflow. Through case studies of a hospital and large B2B enterprise, we find that the adoption of RPA has been inhibited by high set-up costs (12-18 months), unreliable execution (60% initial accuracy), and burdensome maintenance (requiring multiple FTEs). Multimodal foundation models (FMs) such as GPT-4 offer a promising new approach for end-to-end workflow automation given their generalized reasoning and planning abilities. To study these capabilities we propose ECLAIR, a system to automate enterprise workflows with minimal human supervision. We conduct initial experiments showing that multimodal FMs can address the limitations of traditional RPA with (1) near-human-level understanding of workflows (93% accuracy on a workflow understanding task) and (2) instant set-up with minimal technical barrier (based solely on a natural language description of a workflow, ECLAIR achieves end-to-end completion rates of 40%). We identify human-AI collaboration, validation, and self-improvement as open challenges, and suggest ways they can be solved with data management techniques. Code is available at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/eclair-agents

  • 6 authors
·
May 3, 2024 1

AutoFlow: Automated Workflow Generation for Large Language Model Agents

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant progress in understanding complex natural language. One important application of LLM is LLM-based AI Agent, which leverages the ability of LLM as well as external tools for complex-task solving. To make sure LLM Agents follow an effective and reliable procedure to solve the given task, manually designed workflows are usually used to guide the working mechanism of agents. However, manually designing the workflows requires considerable efforts and domain knowledge, making it difficult to develop and deploy agents on massive scales. To address these issues, we propose AutoFlow, a framework designed to automatically generate workflows for agents to solve complex tasks. AutoFlow takes natural language program as the format of agent workflow and employs a workflow optimization procedure to iteratively optimize the workflow quality. Besides, this work offers two workflow generation methods: fine-tuning-based and in-context-based methods, making the AutoFlow framework applicable to both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Experimental results show that our framework can produce robust and reliable agent workflows. We believe that the automatic generation and interpretation of workflows in natural language represent a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, particularly with the rapid development of LLMs. The source code of this work is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AutoFlow.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 1, 2024

A Practical Guide for Designing, Developing, and Deploying Production-Grade Agentic AI Workflows

Agentic AI marks a major shift in how autonomous systems reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks. Unlike traditional single model prompting, agentic workflows integrate multiple specialized agents with different Large Language Models(LLMs), tool-augmented capabilities, orchestration logic, and external system interactions to form dynamic pipelines capable of autonomous decision-making and action. As adoption accelerates across industry and research, organizations face a central challenge: how to design, engineer, and operate production-grade agentic AI workflows that are reliable, observable, maintainable, and aligned with safety and governance requirements. This paper provides a practical, end-to-end guide for designing, developing, and deploying production-quality agentic AI systems. We introduce a structured engineering lifecycle encompassing workflow decomposition, multi-agent design patterns, Model Context Protocol(MCP), and tool integration, deterministic orchestration, Responsible-AI considerations, and environment-aware deployment strategies. We then present nine core best practices for engineering production-grade agentic AI workflows, including tool-first design over MCP, pure-function invocation, single-tool and single-responsibility agents, externalized prompt management, Responsible-AI-aligned model-consortium design, clean separation between workflow logic and MCP servers, containerized deployment for scalable operations, and adherence to the Keep it Simple, Stupid (KISS) principle to maintain simplicity and robustness. To demonstrate these principles in practice, we present a comprehensive case study: a multimodal news-analysis and media-generation workflow. By combining architectural guidance, operational patterns, and practical implementation insights, this paper offers a foundational reference to build robust, extensible, and production-ready agentic AI workflows.

  • 14 authors
·
Dec 9, 2025

SmartFlow: Robotic Process Automation using LLMs

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems face challenges in handling complex processes and diverse screen layouts that require advanced human-like decision-making capabilities. These systems typically rely on pixel-level encoding through drag-and-drop or automation frameworks such as Selenium to create navigation workflows, rather than visual understanding of screen elements. In this context, we present SmartFlow, an AI-based RPA system that uses pre-trained large language models (LLMs) coupled with deep-learning based image understanding. Our system can adapt to new scenarios, including changes in the user interface and variations in input data, without the need for human intervention. SmartFlow uses computer vision and natural language processing to perceive visible elements on the graphical user interface (GUI) and convert them into a textual representation. This information is then utilized by LLMs to generate a sequence of actions that are executed by a scripting engine to complete an assigned task. To assess the effectiveness of SmartFlow, we have developed a dataset that includes a set of generic enterprise applications with diverse layouts, which we are releasing for research use. Our evaluations on this dataset demonstrate that SmartFlow exhibits robustness across different layouts and applications. SmartFlow can automate a wide range of business processes such as form filling, customer service, invoice processing, and back-office operations. SmartFlow can thus assist organizations in enhancing productivity by automating an even larger fraction of screen-based workflows. The demo-video and dataset are available at https://smartflow-4c5a0a.webflow.io/.

  • 5 authors
·
May 21, 2024

WorkflowLLM: Enhancing Workflow Orchestration Capability of Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven a revolutionary paradigm shift in process automation from Robotic Process Automation to Agentic Process Automation by automating the workflow orchestration procedure based on LLMs. However, existing LLMs (even the advanced OpenAI GPT-4o) are confined to achieving satisfactory capability in workflow orchestration. To address this limitation, we present WorkflowLLM, a data-centric framework elaborately designed to enhance the capability of LLMs in workflow orchestration. It first constructs a large-scale fine-tuning dataset WorkflowBench with 106,763 samples, covering 1,503 APIs from 83 applications across 28 categories. Specifically, the construction process can be divided into three phases: (1) Data Collection: we collect real-world workflow data from Apple Shortcuts and RoutineHub, transcribing them into Python-style code. We further equip them with generated hierarchical thought via ChatGPT. (2) Query Expansion: we prompt ChatGPT to generate more task queries to enrich the diversity and complexity of workflows. (3) Workflow Generation: we leverage an annotator model trained on collected data to generate workflows for synthesized queries. Finally, we merge the synthetic samples that pass quality confirmation with the collected samples to obtain the WorkflowBench. Based on WorkflowBench, we fine-tune Llama-3.1-8B to obtain WorkflowLlama. Our experiments show that WorkflowLlama demonstrates a strong capacity to orchestrate complex workflows, while also achieving notable generalization performance on previously unseen APIs. Additionally, WorkflowBench exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capabilities on an out-of-distribution task planning dataset, T-Eval. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/WorkflowLLM.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 8, 2024

Beyond Rule-Based Workflows: An Information-Flow-Orchestrated Multi-Agents Paradigm via Agent-to-Agent Communication from CORAL

Most existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) rely on predefined workflows, where human engineers enumerate task states in advance and specify routing rules and contextual injections accordingly. Such workflow-driven designs are essentially rule-based decision trees, which suffer from two fundamental limitations: they require substantial manual effort to anticipate and encode possible task states, and they cannot exhaustively cover the state space of complex real-world tasks. To address these issues, we propose an Information-Flow-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Paradigm via Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Communication from CORAL, in which a dedicated information flow orchestrator continuously monitors task progress and dynamically coordinates other agents through the A2A toolkit using natural language, without relying on predefined workflows. We evaluate our approach on the general-purpose benchmark GAIA, using the representative workflow-based MAS OWL as the baseline while controlling for agent roles and underlying models. Under the pass@1 setting, our method achieves 63.64% accuracy, outperforming OWL's 55.15% by 8.49 percentage points with comparable token consumption. Further case-level analysis shows that our paradigm enables more flexible task monitoring and more robust handling of edge cases. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/Coral-Protocol/Beyond-Rule-Based-Workflows

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 13

Finch: Benchmarking Finance & Accounting across Spreadsheet-Centric Enterprise Workflows

We introduce a finance & accounting benchmark (Finch) for evaluating AI agents on real-world, enterprise-grade professional workflows -- interleaving data entry, structuring, formatting, web search, cross-file retrieval, calculation, modeling, validation, translation, visualization, and reporting. Finch is sourced from authentic enterprise workspaces at Enron (15,000 spreadsheets and 500,000 emails from 150 employees) and other financial institutions, preserving in-the-wild messiness across multimodal artifacts (text, tables, formulas, charts, code, and images) and spanning diverse domains such as budgeting, trading, and asset management. We propose a workflow construction process that combines LLM-assisted discovery with expert annotation: (1) LLM-assisted, expert-verified derivation of workflows from real-world email threads and version histories of spreadsheet files, and (2) meticulous expert annotation for workflows, requiring over 700 hours of domain-expert effort. This yields 172 composite workflows with 384 tasks, involving 1,710 spreadsheets with 27 million cells, along with PDFs and other artifacts, capturing the intrinsically messy, long-horizon, knowledge-intensive, and collaborative nature of real-world enterprise work. We conduct both human and automated evaluations of frontier AI systems including GPT 5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4, and Qwen 3 Max, and GPT 5.1 Pro spends 16.8 minutes per workflow yet passes only 38.4% of workflows, while Claude Sonnet 4.5 passes just 25.0%. Comprehensive case studies further surface the challenges that real-world enterprise workflows pose for AI agents.

Workflow-GYM: Towards Long-Horizon Evaluation of Computer-use Agentic tasks in Real-World Professional Fields

Recent years have witnessed the rapid evolution of AI agents toward handling increasingly complex, real-world tasks. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can operate graphical user interfaces to complete long-horizon, high-value professional workflows across diverse domains. Current GUI benchmarks still predominantly focus on general-purpose software, relatively simple applications, and short-horizon tasks, leaving it largely unknown whether modern agents can follow user instructions to autonomously operate domain-specific professional software and accomplish economically valuable work in an end-to-end manner. To bridge this gap, we introduce Workflow-GYM, a benchmark for long-horizon GUI tasks centered on professional domains and specialized software environments. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we find that even the strongest models achieve only slightly above 30% success rates, highlighting that professional long-horizon GUI workflows remain highly challenging for current GUI agents. Further analysis reveals that current agents struggle to maintain long-horizon workflow consistency, frequently exhibiting workflow stage omission, error propagation, objective drift, and insufficient understanding of professional software environments. Our findings provide important insights into the limitations of current agent systems and suggest key directions for the next generation of GUI-agent research.

Opus: A Large Work Model for Complex Workflow Generation

This paper introduces Opus, a novel framework for generating and optimizing Workflows tailored to complex Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) use cases, focusing on cost reduction and quality enhancement while adhering to established industry processes and operational constraints. Our approach generates executable Workflows from Intention, defined as the alignment of Client Input, Client Output, and Process Context. These Workflows are represented as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), with nodes as Tasks consisting of sequences of executable Instructions, including tools and human expert reviews. We adopt a two-phase methodology: Workflow Generation and Workflow Optimization. In the Generation phase, Workflows are generated using a Large Work Model (LWM) informed by a Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) that encodes domain-specific procedural and operational knowledge. In the Optimization phase, Workflows are transformed into Workflow Graphs (WFGs), where optimal Workflows are determined through path optimization. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) face challenges in reliably retrieving detailed process data as well as generating industry-compliant workflows. The key contributions of this paper include: - The integration of a Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) into a Large Work Model (LWM), enabling the generation of context-aware, semantically aligned, structured and auditable Workflows. - A two-phase approach that combines Workflow Generation from Intention with graph-based Workflow Optimization. - Opus Alpha 1 Large and Opus Alpha 1 Small, models that outperform state-of-the-art LLMs by 38\% and 29\% respectively in Workflow Generation for a Medical Coding use case.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 30, 2024

Chat2Workflow: A Benchmark for Generating Executable Visual Workflows with Natural Language

At present, executable visual workflows have emerged as a mainstream paradigm in real-world industrial deployments, offering strong reliability and controllability. However, in current practice, such workflows are almost entirely constructed through manual engineering: developers must carefully design workflows, write prompts for each step, and repeatedly revise the logic as requirements evolve-making development costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. To study whether large language models can automate this multi-round interaction process, we introduce Chat2Workflow, a benchmark for generating executable visual workflows directly from natural language, and propose a robust agentic framework to mitigate recurrent execution errors. Chat2Workflow is built from a large collection of real-world business workflows, with each instance designed so that the generated workflow can be transformed and directly deployed to practical workflow platforms such as Dify and Coze. Experimental results show that while state-of-the-art language models can often capture high-level intent, they struggle to generate correct, stable, and executable workflows, especially under complex or changing requirements. Although our agentic framework yields up to 5.34% resolve rate gains, the remaining real-world gap positions Chat2Workflow as a foundation for advancing industrial-grade automation. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/Chat2Workflow.

tencent Tencent
·
Apr 20 3

Rethinking the Value of Multi-Agent Workflow: A Strong Single Agent Baseline

Recent advances in LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) show that workflows composed of multiple LLM agents with distinct roles, tools, and communication patterns can outperform single-LLM baselines on complex tasks. However, most frameworks are homogeneous, where all agents share the same base LLM and differ only in prompts, tools, and positions in the workflow. This raises the question of whether such workflows can be simulated by a single agent through multi-turn conversations. We investigate this across seven benchmarks spanning coding, mathematics, general question answering, domain-specific reasoning, and real-world planning and tool use. Our results show that a single agent can reach the performance of homogeneous workflows with an efficiency advantage from KV cache reuse, and can even match the performance of an automatically optimized heterogeneous workflow. Building on this finding, we propose OneFlow, an algorithm that automatically tailors workflows for single-agent execution, reducing inference costs compared to existing automatic multi-agent design frameworks without trading off accuracy. These results position the single-LLM implementation of multi-agent workflows as a strong baseline for MAS research. We also note that single-LLM methods cannot capture heterogeneous workflows due to the lack of KV cache sharing across different LLMs, highlighting future opportunities in developing truly heterogeneous multi-agent systems.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 17

AIssistant: An Agentic Approach for Human--AI Collaborative Scientific Work on Reviews and Perspectives in Machine Learning

Advances in AI-assisted research have introduced powerful tools for literature retrieval, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and manuscript preparation. However, systems remain fragmented and lack human-centred workflows. To address these gaps, we introduce AIssistant, an agentic, open-source Human-AI collaborative framework designed to simplify the end-to-end creation of scientific workflows. Since our development is still in an early stage, we present here the first experiments with AIssistant for perspective and review research papers in machine learning. Our system integrates modular tools and agents for literature synthesis, section-wise experimentation, citation management, and automatic LaTeX paper text generation, while maintaining human oversight at every stage to ensure accuracy, coherence, and scholarly rigour. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation across three layers: (1) Independent Human Review, following NeurIPS double-blind standards; (2) Automated LLM Review, using GPT-5 as a scalable human review proxy; and (3) Program Chair Oversight, where the chair monitors the entire review process and makes final validation and acceptance decisions. The results demonstrate that AIssistant improves drafting efficiency and thematic consistency. Nonetheless, Human-AI collaboration remains essential for maintaining factual correctness, methodological soundness, and ethical compliance. Despite its effectiveness, we identify key limitations, including hallucinated citations, difficulty adapting to dynamic paper structures, and incomplete integration of multimodal content.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 14, 2025

ComfyUI-R1: Exploring Reasoning Models for Workflow Generation

AI-generated content has evolved from monolithic models to modular workflows, particularly on platforms like ComfyUI, enabling customization in creative pipelines. However, crafting effective workflows requires great expertise to orchestrate numerous specialized components, presenting a steep learning curve for users. To address this challenge, we introduce ComfyUI-R1, the first large reasoning model for automated workflow generation. Starting with our curated dataset of 4K workflows, we construct long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning data, including node selection, workflow planning, and code-level workflow representation. ComfyUI-R1 is trained through a two-stage framework: (1) CoT fine-tuning for cold start, adapting models to the ComfyUI domain; (2) reinforcement learning for incentivizing reasoning capability, guided by a fine-grained rule-metric hybrid reward, ensuring format validity, structural integrity, and node-level fidelity. Experiments show that our 7B-parameter model achieves a 97\% format validity rate, along with high pass rate, node-level and graph-level F1 scores, significantly surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods that employ leading closed-source models such as GPT-4o and Claude series. Further analysis highlights the critical role of the reasoning process and the advantage of transforming workflows into code. Qualitative comparison reveals our strength in synthesizing intricate workflows with diverse nodes, underscoring the potential of long CoT reasoning in AI art creation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025 4

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.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 8

Generating a Low-code Complete Workflow via Task Decomposition and RAG

AI technologies are moving rapidly from research to production. With the popularity of Foundation Models (FMs) that generate text, images, and video, AI-based systems are increasing their complexity. Compared to traditional AI-based software, systems employing FMs, or GenAI-based systems, are more difficult to design due to their scale and versatility. This makes it necessary to document best practices, known as design patterns in software engineering, that can be used across GenAI applications. Our first contribution is to formalize two techniques, Task Decomposition and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), as design patterns for GenAI-based systems. We discuss their trade-offs in terms of software quality attributes and comment on alternative approaches. We recommend to AI practitioners to consider these techniques not only from a scientific perspective but also from the standpoint of desired engineering properties such as flexibility, maintainability, safety, and security. As a second contribution, we describe our industry experience applying Task Decomposition and RAG to build a complex real-world GenAI application for enterprise users: Workflow Generation. The task of generating workflows entails generating a specific plan using data from the system environment, taking as input a user requirement. As these two patterns affect the entire AI development cycle, we explain how they impacted the dataset creation, model training, model evaluation, and deployment phases.

ServiceNow-AI ServiceNow-AI
·
Nov 29, 2024 2

LawFlow : Collecting and Simulating Lawyers' Thought Processes

Legal practitioners, particularly those early in their careers, face complex, high-stakes tasks that require adaptive, context-sensitive reasoning. While AI holds promise in supporting legal work, current datasets and models are narrowly focused on isolated subtasks and fail to capture the end-to-end decision-making required in real-world practice. To address this gap, we introduce LawFlow, a dataset of complete end-to-end legal workflows collected from trained law students, grounded in real-world business entity formation scenarios. Unlike prior datasets focused on input-output pairs or linear chains of thought, LawFlow captures dynamic, modular, and iterative reasoning processes that reflect the ambiguity, revision, and client-adaptive strategies of legal practice. Using LawFlow, we compare human and LLM-generated workflows, revealing systematic differences in structure, reasoning flexibility, and plan execution. Human workflows tend to be modular and adaptive, while LLM workflows are more sequential, exhaustive, and less sensitive to downstream implications. Our findings also suggest that legal professionals prefer AI to carry out supportive roles, such as brainstorming, identifying blind spots, and surfacing alternatives, rather than executing complex workflows end-to-end. Building on these findings, we propose a set of design suggestions, rooted in empirical observations, that align AI assistance with human goals of clarity, completeness, creativity, and efficiency, through hybrid planning, adaptive execution, and decision-point support. Our results highlight both the current limitations of LLMs in supporting complex legal workflows and opportunities for developing more collaborative, reasoning-aware legal AI systems. All data and code are available on our project page (https://minnesotanlp.github.io/LawFlow-website/).

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 26, 2025 2

FinRobot: Generative Business Process AI Agents for Enterprise Resource Planning in Finance

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems serve as the digital backbone of modern financial institutions, yet they continue to rely on static, rule-based workflows that limit adaptability, scalability, and intelligence. As business operations grow more complex and data-rich, conventional ERP platforms struggle to integrate structured and unstructured data in real time and to accommodate dynamic, cross-functional workflows. In this paper, we present the first AI-native, agent-based framework for ERP systems, introducing a novel architecture of Generative Business Process AI Agents (GBPAs) that bring autonomy, reasoning, and dynamic optimization to enterprise workflows. The proposed system integrates generative AI with business process modeling and multi-agent orchestration, enabling end-to-end automation of complex tasks such as budget planning, financial reporting, and wire transfer processing. Unlike traditional workflow engines, GBPAs interpret user intent, synthesize workflows in real time, and coordinate specialized sub-agents for modular task execution. We validate the framework through case studies in bank wire transfers and employee reimbursements, two representative financial workflows with distinct complexity and data modalities. Results show that GBPAs achieve up to 40% reduction in processing time, 94% drop in error rate, and improved regulatory compliance by enabling parallelism, risk control insertion, and semantic reasoning. These findings highlight the potential of GBPAs to bridge the gap between generative AI capabilities and enterprise-grade automation, laying the groundwork for the next generation of intelligent ERP systems.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 2, 2025

FlowMind: Automatic Workflow Generation with LLMs

The rapidly evolving field of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has made significant strides in automating repetitive processes, yet its effectiveness diminishes in scenarios requiring spontaneous or unpredictable tasks demanded by users. This paper introduces a novel approach, FlowMind, leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT), to address this limitation and create an automatic workflow generation system. In FlowMind, we propose a generic prompt recipe for a lecture that helps ground LLM reasoning with reliable Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). With this, FlowMind not only mitigates the common issue of hallucinations in LLMs, but also eliminates direct interaction between LLMs and proprietary data or code, thus ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of information - a cornerstone in financial services. FlowMind further simplifies user interaction by presenting high-level descriptions of auto-generated workflows, enabling users to inspect and provide feedback effectively. We also introduce NCEN-QA, a new dataset in finance for benchmarking question-answering tasks from N-CEN reports on funds. We used NCEN-QA to evaluate the performance of workflows generated by FlowMind against baseline and ablation variants of FlowMind. We demonstrate the success of FlowMind, the importance of each component in the proposed lecture recipe, and the effectiveness of user interaction and feedback in FlowMind.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 16, 2024 1

AutoResearch AI: Towards AI-Powered Research Automation for Scientific Discovery

Scientific research is being reshaped by AI systems that move beyond isolated assistance toward longer-horizon workflows spanning literature grounding, hypothesis generation, experimentation, validation, reporting, and revision. This shift marks a transition from task-level AI for science to workflow-level research automation. Yet current systems remain fragmented, differing in autonomy, domain scope, execution environment, validation mechanism, and human oversight, while still struggling with evidence preservation, reproducibility, weak-direction rejection, provenance tracking, cross-domain robustness, and accountable scientific closure. This survey examines these developments through AutoResearch, defined as the developmental spectrum of AI-powered scientific workflow automation. Within it, Vibe Research denotes the human-steered region of prompt-based assistance and human-verified execution, whereas emerging AI-led systems coordinate larger portions of the discovery loop without achieving robust autonomy. We analyze how research systems redistribute control, evidence, execution, validation, and accountability across workflows and organize the field around five workflow conditions: literature and research grounding; hypothesis formation and planning; experimentation and tool use; feedback, validation, and review; and reporting and knowledge communication. We further synthesize AI scientist systems, mixed-initiative co-research frameworks, benchmarks, domain deployments, and open-source infrastructures. Finally, we propose five evaluation dimensions--novelty, validity, impact, reliability, and provenance--and show that AutoResearch autonomy is domain-conditioned, being more credible in structured, executable, and rapidly verifiable settings but limited in embodied, delayed, heterogeneous, ethical, or institutionally accountable contexts.

  • 23 authors
·
May 21 4

ComfyGPT: A Self-Optimizing Multi-Agent System for Comprehensive ComfyUI Workflow Generation

ComfyUI provides a widely-adopted, workflow-based interface that enables users to customize various image generation tasks through an intuitive node-based architecture. However, the intricate connections between nodes and diverse modules often present a steep learning curve for users. In this paper, we introduce ComfyGPT, the first self-optimizing multi-agent system designed to generate ComfyUI workflows based on task descriptions automatically. ComfyGPT comprises four specialized agents: ReformatAgent, FlowAgent, RefineAgent, and ExecuteAgent. The core innovation of ComfyGPT lies in two key aspects. First, it focuses on generating individual node links rather than entire workflows, significantly improving generation precision. Second, we proposed FlowAgent, a LLM-based workflow generation agent that uses both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to improve workflow generation accuracy. Moreover, we introduce FlowDataset, a large-scale dataset containing 13,571 workflow-description pairs, and FlowBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating workflow generation systems. We also propose four novel evaluation metrics: Format Validation (FV), Pass Accuracy (PA), Pass Instruct Alignment (PIA), and Pass Node Diversity (PND). Experimental results demonstrate that ComfyGPT significantly outperforms existing LLM-based methods in workflow generation.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 22, 2025

Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI): Architectures, Taxonomies, and Evaluation of Large Language Model Agents

Artificial Intelligence is moving from models that only generate text to Agentic AI, where systems behave as autonomous entities that can perceive, reason, plan, and act. Large Language Models (LLMs) are no longer used only as passive knowledge engines but as cognitive controllers that combine memory, tool use, and feedback from their environment to pursue extended goals. This shift already supports the automation of complex workflows in software engineering, scientific discovery, and web navigation, yet the variety of emerging designs, from simple single loop agents to hierarchical multi agent systems, makes the landscape hard to navigate. In this paper, we investigate architectures and propose a unified taxonomy that breaks agents into Perception, Brain, Planning, Action, Tool Use, and Collaboration. We use this lens to describe the move from linear reasoning procedures to native inference time reasoning models, and the transition from fixed API calls to open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Native Computer Use. We also group the environments in which these agents operate, including digital operating systems, embodied robotics, and other specialized domains, and we review current evaluation practices. Finally, we highlight open challenges, such as hallucination in action, infinite loops, and prompt injection, and outline future research directions toward more robust and reliable autonomous systems.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 18

Large Action Models: From Inception to Implementation

As AI continues to advance, there is a growing demand for systems that go beyond language-based assistance and move toward intelligent agents capable of performing real-world actions. This evolution requires the transition from traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at generating textual responses, to Large Action Models (LAMs), designed for action generation and execution within dynamic environments. Enabled by agent systems, LAMs hold the potential to transform AI from passive language understanding to active task completion, marking a significant milestone in the progression toward artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework for developing LAMs, offering a systematic approach to their creation, from inception to deployment. We begin with an overview of LAMs, highlighting their unique characteristics and delineating their differences from LLMs. Using a Windows OS-based agent as a case study, we provide a detailed, step-by-step guide on the key stages of LAM development, including data collection, model training, environment integration, grounding, and evaluation. This generalizable workflow can serve as a blueprint for creating functional LAMs in various application domains. We conclude by identifying the current limitations of LAMs and discussing directions for future research and industrial deployment, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in realizing the full potential of LAMs in real-world applications. The code for the data collection process utilized in this paper is publicly available at: https://github.com/microsoft/UFO/tree/main/dataflow, and comprehensive documentation can be found at https://microsoft.github.io/UFO/dataflow/overview/.

  • 18 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024 5

MusicAgent: An AI Agent for Music Understanding and Generation with Large Language Models

AI-empowered music processing is a diverse field that encompasses dozens of tasks, ranging from generation tasks (e.g., timbre synthesis) to comprehension tasks (e.g., music classification). For developers and amateurs, it is very difficult to grasp all of these task to satisfy their requirements in music processing, especially considering the huge differences in the representations of music data and the model applicability across platforms among various tasks. Consequently, it is necessary to build a system to organize and integrate these tasks, and thus help practitioners to automatically analyze their demand and call suitable tools as solutions to fulfill their requirements. Inspired by the recent success of large language models (LLMs) in task automation, we develop a system, named MusicAgent, which integrates numerous music-related tools and an autonomous workflow to address user requirements. More specifically, we build 1) toolset that collects tools from diverse sources, including Hugging Face, GitHub, and Web API, etc. 2) an autonomous workflow empowered by LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) to organize these tools and automatically decompose user requests into multiple sub-tasks and invoke corresponding music tools. The primary goal of this system is to free users from the intricacies of AI-music tools, enabling them to concentrate on the creative aspect. By granting users the freedom to effortlessly combine tools, the system offers a seamless and enriching music experience.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 18, 2023 2

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.

ibm IBM
·
Mar 23 2

Cochain: Balancing Insufficient and Excessive Collaboration in LLM Agent Workflows

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in executing complex reasoning tasks. Chain-of-thought effectively enhances reasoning capabilities by unlocking the potential of large models, while multi-agent systems provide more comprehensive solutions by integrating the collective intelligence of multiple agents. However, both approaches face significant limitations. Single-agent with chain-of-thought, due to the inherent complexity of designing cross-domain prompts, faces collaboration challenges. Meanwhile, multi-agent systems consume substantial tokens and inevitably dilute the primary problem, which is particularly problematic in business workflow tasks. To address these challenges, we propose Cochain, a collaboration prompting framework that effectively solves the business workflow collaboration problem by combining knowledge and prompts at a reduced cost. Specifically, we construct an integrated knowledge graph that incorporates knowledge from multiple stages. Furthermore, by maintaining and retrieving a prompts tree, we can obtain prompt information relevant to other stages of the business workflow. We perform extensive evaluations of Cochain across multiple datasets, demonstrating that Cochain outperforms all baselines in both prompt engineering and multi-agent LLMs. Additionally, expert evaluation results indicate that the use of a small model in combination with Cochain outperforms GPT-4.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 9

Meta-Agent: From Task Descriptions to Verified Multi-Agent Systems

AI agents are increasingly used to solve complex, multi-step tasks, but existing multi-agent frameworks remain brittle as workflows grow in scale and depth. Small errors at intermediate stages can propagate through agent interactions, while insufficient grounding and weak verification mechanisms further limit reliability. We present Meta-Agent, a two-phase framework that automatically constructs and executes specialized multi-agent systems from natural-language task descriptions. In the construction phase, a task planner decomposes a problem into a directed acyclic graph of agent specifications with explicit input/output contracts and verification criteria. A web search module grounds each specification with external evidence, and a code generation module produces system prompts and tool configurations. A construction-time verification stage then validates generated artifacts and triggers targeted regeneration when failures are detected. In the execution phase, a coordinator dispatches subtasks across the agent graph while execution-time verification gates intermediate outputs. We further introduce a three-level error attribution mechanism that distinguishes local, upstream, and structural failures, enabling targeted recovery strategies ranging from localized retries to partial re-execution and re-decomposition. We evaluate Meta-Agent across coding, contextual learning, and open-ended reasoning tasks. Experiments against strong multi-agent baselines and ablation studies demonstrate consistent improvements in task success rate, error recovery, and workflow stability. The results highlight the importance of tightly integrating planning, grounding, and verification for building reliable multi-agent systems.

  • 2 authors
·
May 23

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 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 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 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.

FROAV: A Framework for RAG Observation and Agent Verification -- Lowering the Barrier to LLM Agent Research

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their integration into autonomous agent systems has created unprecedented opportunities for document analysis, decision support, and knowledge retrieval. However, the complexity of developing, evaluating, and iterating on LLM-based agent workflows presents significant barriers to researchers, particularly those without extensive software engineering expertise. We present FROAV (Framework for RAG Observation and Agent Verification), an open-source research platform that democratizes LLM agent research by providing a plug-and-play architecture combining visual workflow orchestration, a comprehensive evaluation framework, and extensible Python integration. FROAV implements a multi-stage Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline coupled with a rigorous "LLM-as-a-Judge" evaluation system, all accessible through intuitive graphical interfaces. Our framework integrates n8n for no-code workflow design, PostgreSQL for granular data management, FastAPI for flexible backend logic, and Streamlit for human-in-the-loop interaction. Through this integrated ecosystem, researchers can rapidly prototype RAG strategies, conduct prompt engineering experiments, validate agent performance against human judgments, and collect structured feedback-all without writing infrastructure code. We demonstrate the framework's utility through its application to financial document analysis, while emphasizing its material-agnostic architecture that adapts to any domain requiring semantic analysis. FROAV represents a significant step toward making LLM agent research accessible to a broader scientific community, enabling researchers to focus on hypothesis testing and algorithmic innovation rather than system integration challenges.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 11

Spider2-V: How Far Are Multimodal Agents From Automating Data Science and Engineering Workflows?

Data science and engineering workflows often span multiple stages, from warehousing to orchestration, using tools like BigQuery, dbt, and Airbyte. As vision language models (VLMs) advance in multimodal understanding and code generation, VLM-based agents could potentially automate these workflows by generating SQL queries, Python code, and GUI operations. This automation can improve the productivity of experts while democratizing access to large-scale data analysis. In this paper, we introduce Spider2-V, the first multimodal agent benchmark focusing on professional data science and engineering workflows, featuring 494 real-world tasks in authentic computer environments and incorporating 20 enterprise-level professional applications. These tasks, derived from real-world use cases, evaluate the ability of a multimodal agent to perform data-related tasks by writing code and managing the GUI in enterprise data software systems. To balance realistic simulation with evaluation simplicity, we devote significant effort to developing automatic configurations for task setup and carefully crafting evaluation metrics for each task. Furthermore, we supplement multimodal agents with comprehensive documents of these enterprise data software systems. Our empirical evaluation reveals that existing state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents do not reliably automate full data workflows (14.0% success). Even with step-by-step guidance, these agents still underperform in tasks that require fine-grained, knowledge-intensive GUI actions (16.2%) and involve remote cloud-hosted workspaces (10.6%). We hope that Spider2-V paves the way for autonomous multimodal agents to transform the automation of data science and engineering workflow. Our code and data are available at https://spider2-v.github.io.

  • 23 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024 2

CoSTAast: Cost-Sensitive Toolpath Agent for Multi-turn Image Editing

Text-to-image models like stable diffusion and DALLE-3 still struggle with multi-turn image editing. We decompose such a task as an agentic workflow (path) of tool use that addresses a sequence of subtasks by AI tools of varying costs. Conventional search algorithms require expensive exploration to find tool paths. While large language models (LLMs) possess prior knowledge of subtask planning, they may lack accurate estimations of capabilities and costs of tools to determine which to apply in each subtask. Can we combine the strengths of both LLMs and graph search to find cost-efficient tool paths? We propose a three-stage approach "CoSTA*" that leverages LLMs to create a subtask tree, which helps prune a graph of AI tools for the given task, and then conducts A* search on the small subgraph to find a tool path. To better balance the total cost and quality, CoSTA* combines both metrics of each tool on every subtask to guide the A* search. Each subtask's output is then evaluated by a vision-language model (VLM), where a failure will trigger an update of the tool's cost and quality on the subtask. Hence, the A* search can recover from failures quickly to explore other paths. Moreover, CoSTA* can automatically switch between modalities across subtasks for a better cost-quality trade-off. We build a novel benchmark of challenging multi-turn image editing, on which CoSTA* outperforms state-of-the-art image-editing models or agents in terms of both cost and quality, and performs versatile trade-offs upon user preference.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 13, 2025 10

Helpful Agent Meets Deceptive Judge: Understanding Vulnerabilities in Agentic Workflows

Agentic workflows -- where multiple large language model (LLM) instances interact to solve tasks -- are increasingly built on feedback mechanisms, where one model evaluates and critiques another. Despite the promise of feedback-driven improvement, the stability of agentic workflows rests on the reliability of the judge. However, judges may hallucinate information, exhibit bias, or act adversarially -- introducing critical vulnerabilities into the workflow. In this work, we present a systematic analysis of agentic workflows under deceptive or misleading feedback. We introduce a two-dimensional framework for analyzing judge behavior, along axes of intent (from constructive to malicious) and knowledge (from parametric-only to retrieval-augmented systems). Using this taxonomy, we construct a suite of judge behaviors and develop WAFER-QA, a new benchmark with critiques grounded in retrieved web evidence to evaluate robustness of agentic workflows against factually supported adversarial feedback. We reveal that even strongest agents are vulnerable to persuasive yet flawed critiques -- often switching correct answers after a single round of misleading feedback. Taking a step further, we study how model predictions evolve over multiple rounds of interaction, revealing distinct behavioral patterns between reasoning and non-reasoning models. Our findings highlight fundamental vulnerabilities in feedback-based workflows and offer guidance for building more robust agentic systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 3, 2025

Flows: Building Blocks of Reasoning and Collaborating AI

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have produced highly capable and controllable systems. This creates unprecedented opportunities for structured reasoning as well as collaboration among multiple AI systems and humans. To fully realize this potential, it is essential to develop a principled way of designing and studying such structured interactions. For this purpose, we introduce the conceptual framework of Flows: a systematic approach to modeling complex interactions. Flows are self-contained building blocks of computation, with an isolated state, communicating through a standardized message-based interface. This modular design allows Flows to be recursively composed into arbitrarily nested interactions, with a substantial reduction of complexity. Crucially, any interaction can be implemented using this framework, including prior work on AI--AI and human--AI interactions, prompt engineering schemes, and tool augmentation. We demonstrate the potential of Flows on the task of competitive coding, a challenging task on which even GPT-4 struggles. Our results suggest that structured reasoning and collaboration substantially improve generalization, with AI-only Flows adding +21 and human--AI Flows adding +54 absolute points in terms of solve rate. To support rapid and rigorous research, we introduce the aiFlows library. The library comes with a repository of Flows that can be easily used, extended, and composed into novel, more complex Flows. The aiFlows library is available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/aiflows. Data and Flows for reproducing our experiments are available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/cc_flows.

  • 10 authors
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Aug 2, 2023

LHAW: Controllable Underspecification for Long-Horizon Tasks

Long-horizon workflow agents that operate effectively over extended periods are essential for truly autonomous systems. Their reliable execution critically depends on the ability to reason through ambiguous situations in which clarification seeking is necessary to ensure correct task execution. However, progress is limited by the lack of scalable, task-agnostic frameworks for systematically curating and measuring the impact of ambiguity across custom workflows. We address this gap by introducing LHAW (Long-Horizon Augmented Workflows), a modular, dataset-agnostic synthetic pipeline that transforms any well-specified task into controllable underspecified variants by systematically removing information across four dimensions - Goals, Constraints, Inputs, and Context - at configurable severity levels. Unlike approaches that rely on LLM predictions of ambiguity, LHAW validates variants through empirical agent trials, classifying them as outcome-critical, divergent, or benign based on observed terminal state divergence. We release 285 task variants from TheAgentCompany, SWE-Bench Pro and MCP-Atlas according to our taxonomy alongside formal analysis measuring how current agents detect, reason about, and resolve underspecification across ambiguous settings. LHAW provides the first systematic framework for cost-sensitive evaluation of agent clarification behavior in long-horizon settings, enabling development of reliable autonomous systems.

  • 9 authors
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Feb 10

kRAIG: A Natural Language-Driven Agent for Automated DataOps Pipeline Generation

Modern machine learning systems rely on complex data engineering workflows to extract, transform, and load (ELT) data into production pipelines. However, constructing these pipelines remains time-consuming and requires substantial expertise in data infrastructure and orchestration frameworks. Recent advances in large language model (LLM) agents offer a potential path toward automating these workflows, but existing approaches struggle with under-specified user intent, unreliable tool generation, and limited guarantees of executable outputs. We introduce kRAIG, an AI agent that translates natural language specifications into production-ready Kubeflow Pipelines (KFP). To resolve ambiguity in user intent, we propose ReQuesAct (Reason, Question, Act), an interaction framework that explicitly clarifies intent prior to pipeline synthesis. The system orchestrates end-to-end data movement from diverse sources and generates task-specific transformation components through a retrieval-augmented tool synthesis process. To ensure data quality and safety, kRAIG incorporates LLM-based validation stages that verify pipeline integrity prior to execution. Our framework achieves a 3x improvement in extraction and loading success and a 25 percent increase in transformation accuracy compared to state-of-the-art agentic baselines. These improvements demonstrate that structured agent workflows with explicit intent clarification and validation significantly enhance the reliability and executability of automated data engineering pipelines.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 19

ReVise: A Human-AI Interface for Incremental Algorithmic Recourse

The recent adoption of artificial intelligence in socio-technical systems raises concerns about the black-box nature of the resulting decisions in fields such as hiring, finance, admissions, etc. If data subjects -- such as job applicants, loan applicants, and students -- receive an unfavorable outcome, they may be interested in algorithmic recourse, which involves updating certain features to yield a more favorable result when re-evaluated by algorithmic decision-making. Unfortunately, when individuals do not fully understand the incremental steps needed to change their circumstances, they risk following misguided paths that can lead to significant, long-term adverse consequences. Existing recourse approaches focus exclusively on the final recourse goal but neglect the possible incremental steps to reach the goal with real-life constraints, user preferences, and model artifacts. To address this gap, we formulate a visual analytic workflow for incremental recourse planning in collaboration with AI/ML experts and contribute an interactive visualization interface that helps data subjects efficiently navigate the recourse alternatives and make an informed decision. We present a usage scenario and subjective feedback from observational studies with twelve graduate students using a real-world dataset, which demonstrates that our approach can be instrumental for data subjects in choosing a suitable recourse path.

  • 3 authors
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Jul 1, 2025

The Cost of Dynamic Reasoning: Demystifying AI Agents and Test-Time Scaling from an AI Infrastructure Perspective

Large-language-model (LLM)-based AI agents have recently showcased impressive versatility by employing dynamic reasoning, an adaptive, multi-step process that coordinates with external tools. This shift from static, single-turn inference to agentic, multi-turn workflows broadens task generalization and behavioral flexibility, but it also introduces serious concerns about system-level cost, efficiency, and sustainability. This paper presents the first comprehensive system-level analysis of AI agents, quantifying their resource usage, latency behavior, energy consumption, and datacenter-wide power consumption demands across diverse agent designs and test-time scaling strategies. We further characterize how AI agent design choices, such as few-shot prompting, reflection depth, and parallel reasoning, impact accuracy-cost tradeoffs. Our findings reveal that while agents improve accuracy with increased compute, they suffer from rapidly diminishing returns, widening latency variance, and unsustainable infrastructure costs. Through detailed evaluation of representative agents, we highlight the profound computational demands introduced by AI agent workflows, uncovering a looming sustainability crisis. These results call for a paradigm shift in agent design toward compute-efficient reasoning, balancing performance with deployability under real-world constraints.

  • 4 authors
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Jun 4, 2025

Vibe Coding vs. Agentic Coding: Fundamentals and Practical Implications of Agentic AI

This review presents a comprehensive analysis of two emerging paradigms in AI-assisted software development: vibe coding and agentic coding. While both leverage large language models (LLMs), they differ fundamentally in autonomy, architectural design, and the role of the developer. Vibe coding emphasizes intuitive, human-in-the-loop interaction through prompt-based, conversational workflows that support ideation, experimentation, and creative exploration. In contrast, agentic coding enables autonomous software development through goal-driven agents capable of planning, executing, testing, and iterating tasks with minimal human intervention. We propose a detailed taxonomy spanning conceptual foundations, execution models, feedback loops, safety mechanisms, debugging strategies, and real-world tool ecosystems. Through comparative workflow analysis and 20 detailed use cases, we illustrate how vibe systems thrive in early-stage prototyping and education, while agentic systems excel in enterprise-grade automation, codebase refactoring, and CI/CD integration. We further examine emerging trends in hybrid architectures, where natural language interfaces are coupled with autonomous execution pipelines. Finally, we articulate a future roadmap for agentic AI, outlining the infrastructure needed for trustworthy, explainable, and collaborative systems. Our findings suggest that successful AI software engineering will rely not on choosing one paradigm, but on harmonizing their strengths within a unified, human-centered development lifecycle.

  • 3 authors
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May 25, 2025 2

Doc To The Future: Infomorphs for Interactive, Multimodal Document Transformation and Generation

Creating new documents by synthesizing information from existing sources is an important part of knowledge work in many domains. This process often involves gathering content from multiple documents, organizing it, and then transforming it into new forms such as reports, slides, or spreadsheets. While recent advances in Generative AI have shown potential in automating parts of this process, they often provide limited user control over the handling of multimodal inputs and outputs. In this work, we introduce the notion of "infomorphs" which are modular, user-steerable, AI-augmented transformations that support controlled synthesis, and restructuring of information across formats and modalities. We propose a design space that leverage infomorph-driven workflows to enable flexible, interactive, and multimodal document creation by combining Generative AI techniques with user intent and desired information context. As a concrete instantiation of this design space, we present DocuCraft, a canvas-based interface to visually compose infomorph workflows. DocuCraft allows users to chain together infomorphs that perform operations such as page extraction, content summarization, reformatting, and generation, leveraging Generative AI at each stage to support rich, cross-document and cross-modal transformations. We demonstrate the capabilities of DocuCraft through an example-driven usage scenario that spans across different facets of common knowledge work tasks illustrating its support for fluid, human-in-the-loop document synthesis and highlights opportunities for more transparent and modular interaction for Generative AI-assisted information work.

  • 1 authors
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Dec 14, 2025

Claw-Eval-Live: A Live Agent Benchmark for Evolving Real-World Workflows

LLM agents are expected to complete end-to-end units of work across software tools, business services, and local workspaces. Yet many agent benchmarks freeze a curated task set at release time and grade mainly the final response, making it difficult to evaluate agents against evolving workflow demand or verify whether a task was executed. We introduce Claw-Eval-Live, a live benchmark for workflow agents that separates a refreshable signal layer, updated across releases from public workflow-demand signals, from a reproducible, time-stamped release snapshot. Each release is constructed from public workflow-demand signals, with ClawHub Top-500 skills used in the current release, and materialized as controlled tasks with fixed fixtures, services, workspaces, and graders. For grading, Claw-Eval-Live records execution traces, audit logs, service state, and post-run workspace artifacts, using deterministic checks when evidence is sufficient and structured LLM judging only for semantic dimensions. The release contains 105 tasks spanning controlled business services and local workspace repair, and evaluates 13 frontier models under a shared public pass rule. Experiments reveal that reliable workflow automation remains far from solved: the leading model passes only 66.7% of tasks and no model reaches 70%. Failures are structured by task family and execution surface, with HR, management, and multi-system business workflows as persistent bottlenecks and local workspace repair comparatively easier but unsaturated. Leaderboard rank alone is insufficient because models with similar pass rates can diverge in overall completion, and task-level discrimination concentrates in a middle band of tasks. Claw-Eval-Live suggests that workflow-agent evaluation should be grounded twice, in fresh external demand and in verifiable agent action.

  • 11 authors
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Apr 29 2

Claw AI Lab: An Autonomous Multi-Agent Research Team

We present Claw AI Lab, a lab-native autonomous research platform that advances automated research from a hidden prompt-to-paper pipeline into an interactive AI laboratory. Rather than centering the system around a single agent or a fixed serial workflow, we allow users to instantiate a full research team from one prompt, with customizable roles, collaborative workflows, real-time monitoring, artifact inspection, and rollback/resume control through a unified dashboard. The platform also supports distinct research modes for exploration, multi-agent discussion, and reproduction, making autonomous research substantially more steerable and laboratory-like in practice. A key practical contribution of Claw AI Lab lies in its Claw-Code Harness, which connects local codebases, datasets, and checkpoints to runnable experiments and feeds execution artifacts back into the research loop. As a result, the harness improves not only execution integration, but also experimental completion and result integrity: experiments are easier to inspect, iterate on, and faithfully transfer into final papers, reducing common failure modes such as partial runs and malformed result reporting. In our internal evaluation on five AI research case studies, using AutoResearchClaw as the baseline, Claw AI Lab is consistently preferred by AI expert judges on idea novelty, experiment completeness, and paper presentation quality. We view Claw AI Lab as an early step toward a new paradigm: autonomous research as usable, interactive, and reliability-aware scientific infrastructure.

  • 15 authors
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May 20

Knowledge Graph Modeling-Driven Large Language Model Operating System (LLM OS) for Task Automation in Process Engineering Problem-Solving

We present the Process Engineering Operations Assistant (PEOA), an AI-driven framework designed to solve complex problems in the chemical and process industries. The framework employs a modular architecture orchestrated by a meta-agent, which serves as the central coordinator, managing an action generator and instruction-tuned small-scale language models (expert models). The action generator decomposes complex problems into sub-tasks and identifies suitable expert models to execute each, delivering precise solutions for multi-step problem-solving. Key techniques include advanced knowledge modeling using property graphs for improved information retrieval, facilitating more accurate and contextually relevant solutions. Additionally, the framework utilizes a teacher-student transfer-learning approach with GPT-4 (Omni) to fine-tune the action generator and expert models for domain adaptation, alongside an iterative problem-solving mechanism with sophisticated error handling. Custom datasets were developed to evaluate the framework against leading proprietary language models on various engineering tasks. The results demonstrate the framework effectiveness in automating calculations, accelerating prototyping, and providing AI-augmented decision support for industrial processes, marking a significant advancement in process engineering capabilities.

  • 3 authors
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Aug 23, 2024

A Formal Hierarchical Architecture for Agentic Orchestration with Stack-Based Execution and Lazy Discovery

The rapid expansion of capabilities in Large Language Model (LLM) agents has exposed a critical architectural bottleneck: when agents are given access to a flat, monolithic registry of tools, the model must evaluate hundreds or thousands of options simultaneously. This leads to decision-space explosion, context window saturation, and degraded routing accuracy. To address these limitations, this paper presents a hierarchical, skill-based architecture for agentic orchestration. Capabilities are organized as a rooted tree where internal nodes make routing decisions and leaf nodes execute deterministic tasks. The runtime enforces a single-step execution loop governed by a Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) stack, giving the agent a form of memory akin to a Pushdown Automaton, therefore enabling it to track nested execution contexts and resume deterministically from any depth. Capability discovery follows a manifest-driven, lazy-loading protocol: only the immediate children of the active node are loaded, so memory and prompt costs scale with the explored path rather than the global registry. By replacing global memory with localized stack frames, the architecture prevents outputs from one execution branch from leaking into another, establishing the isolation guarantees required for deployment in regulated enterprise environments. We also discuss UPI Help, an AI-powered digital payments support product, as a motivating production deployment context. We provide a mathematical formalization of the orchestration state, detailed algorithmic analysis of the execution loop, and controlled benchmarks comparing flat and hierarchical routing under increasing tool catalogs, multi-step workflow pressure, and visible schema-token exposure per LLM call.

  • 12 authors
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Jul 12

Agentic Systems in Radiology: Design, Applications, Evaluation, and Challenges

Building agents, systems that perceive and act upon their environment with a degree of autonomy, has long been a focus of AI research. This pursuit has recently become vastly more practical with the emergence of large language models (LLMs) capable of using natural language to integrate information, follow instructions, and perform forms of "reasoning" and planning across a wide range of tasks. With its multimodal data streams and orchestrated workflows spanning multiple systems, radiology is uniquely suited to benefit from agents that can adapt to context and automate repetitive yet complex tasks. In radiology, LLMs and their multimodal variants have already demonstrated promising performance for individual tasks such as information extraction and report summarization. However, using LLMs in isolation underutilizes their potential to support complex, multi-step workflows where decisions depend on evolving context from multiple information sources. Equipping LLMs with external tools and feedback mechanisms enables them to drive systems that exhibit a spectrum of autonomy, ranging from semi-automated workflows to more adaptive agents capable of managing complex processes. This review examines the design of such LLM-driven agentic systems, highlights key applications, discusses evaluation methods for planning and tool use, and outlines challenges such as error cascades, tool-use efficiency, and health IT integration.

  • 11 authors
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Oct 10, 2025

HDFlow: Enhancing LLM Complex Problem-Solving with Hybrid Thinking and Dynamic Workflows

Despite recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), their performance on complex reasoning problems requiring multi-step thinking and combining various skills is still limited. To address this, we propose a novel framework HDFlow for complex reasoning with LLMs that combines fast and slow thinking modes in an adaptive manner. Our approach consists of two key components: 1) a new approach for slow, deliberate reasoning called Dynamic Workflow, which automatically decomposes complex problems into more manageable sub-tasks and dynamically designs a workflow to assemble specialized LLM or symbolic reasoning tools to solve sub-tasks; 2) Hybrid Thinking, a general framework that dynamically combines fast and slow thinking based on problem complexity. Finally, we propose an easy-to-scale method for automatically synthesizing a large-scale dataset of 27K challenging reasoning problems for complex reasoning and a hybrid thinking tuning method that trains smaller LLMs on this dataset to internalize the fast/slow hybrid reasoning strategies. Experiments on four reasoning benchmark datasets demonstrate that our slow thinking with dynamic workflows significantly outperforms Chain-of-Thought, and hybrid thinking achieves the highest accuracy while providing an effective balance between computational efficiency and performance. Fine-tuning using our hybrid thinking approach also significantly boosts the complex reasoning capabilities of open-source language models. The results showcase the promise of slow thinking, dynamic workflows, and hybrid thinking in expanding the frontier of complex problem-solving with LLMsCode and data will be released at \url{https://github.com/wenlinyao/HDFlow.}.

  • 3 authors
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Sep 25, 2024 2

Autonomous Deep Agent

This technical brief introduces Deep Agent, an advanced autonomous AI system designed to manage complex multi-phase tasks through a novel hierarchical task management architecture. The system's foundation is built on our Hierarchical Task DAG (HTDAG) framework, which dynamically decomposes high-level objectives into manageable sub-tasks while rigorously maintaining dependencies and execution coherence. Deep Agent advances beyond traditional agent systems through three key innovations: First, it implements a recursive two-stage planner-executor architecture that enables continuous task refinement and adaptation as circumstances change. Second, it features an Autonomous API & Tool Creation (AATC) system that automatically generates reusable components from UI interactions, substantially reducing operational costs for similar tasks. Third, it incorporates Prompt Tweaking Engine and Autonomous Prompt Feedback Learning components that optimize Large Language Model prompts for specific scenarios, enhancing both inference accuracy and operational stability. These components are integrated to form a service infrastructure that manages user contexts, handles complex task dependencies, and orchestrates end-to-end agentic workflow execution. Through this sophisticated architecture, Deep Agent establishes a novel paradigm in self-governing AI systems, demonstrating robust capability to independently handle intricate, multi-step tasks while maintaining consistent efficiency and reliability through continuous self-optimization.

  • 5 authors
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Feb 10, 2025

ThunderAgent: A Simple, Fast and Program-Aware Agentic Inference System

Large language models(LLMs) are now used to power complex multi-turn agentic workflows. Existing systems run agentic inference by loosely assembling isolated components: an LLM inference engine (e.g., vLLM) and a tool orchestrator (e.g., Kubernetes). Although agentic workflows involve multiple LLM and tool requests, these systems schedule and allocate resources separately on a per-request basis, without end-to-end knowledge of the workflow. This leads to sub-optimal management of KV cache and tool execution environments. To address the challenges, we propose ThunderAgent, a fast, simple, and program-aware agentic inference system. We first abstract agentic workflows as LLM Programs, enabling a unified view of heterogeneous resources, including KV caches, system states, and external tool assets such as disk memory and network ports. Built upon this abstraction, ThunderAgent introduces a program-aware scheduler and a tool resource manager designed to maximize KV cache hit rates, mitigate memory imbalances, and enable asynchronous environment preparation. Evaluations across coding, routing, and scientific discovery agents demonstrate that ThunderAgent achieves 1.5-3.6x throughput improvements in serving, 1.8-3.9x in RL rollout, and up to 4.2x disk memory savings compared to state-of-the-art inference systems. To facilitate reproducibility and support future development, we open-source the system implementations of the whole ThunderAgent at: https://github.com/Agentic-Kinetics/ThunderAgent.

  • 10 authors
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Feb 14

Autonomous Business System via Neuro-symbolic AI

Modern business environments demand continuous reconfiguration of cross-functional processes, yet most enterprise systems remain organized around siloed departments, rigid workflows, and hard-coded automation. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in interpreting natural language and synthesizing unstructured information, but they lack deterministic, auditable execution of complex business logic. We introduce Autonomous Business System (AUTOBUS), a system that integrates LLM-based AI agents, predicate-logic programming, and business-semantics-centric enterprise data into a unified neuro-symbolic architecture for executing end-to-end business initiatives. AUTOBUS models a business initiative as a network of interrelated tasks with explicit pre- and post-conditions, required data, evaluation rules, and API-level actions. Enterprise data is organized as a knowledge graph, whose entities, relationships, and constraints are translated into logic facts and foundational rules that ground reasoning and ensure semantic consistency. Core AI agents synthesize task instructions, enterprise semantics, and available tools into task-specific logic programs, which are executed by a logic engine that enforces constraints, coordinates auxiliary tools, and produces deterministic outcomes. Humans specify task instructions, define and maintain business semantics and policies, curate tools, and supervise high-impact or ambiguous decisions, ensuring accountability and adaptability. We detail the AUTOBUS architecture, the structure of AI-generated logic programs, and the human-AI collaboration model and present a case study that demonstrates accelerated time to market in a data-rich organization. A reference implementation of the case study is available at https://github.com/cecilpang/autobus-paper.

  • 2 authors
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Jan 21