Daily Papers

We introduce ComfyUI-Copilot, a large language model-powered plugin designed to enhance the usability and efficiency of ComfyUI, an open-source platform for AI-driven art creation. Despite its flexibility and user-friendly interface, ComfyUI can present challenges to newcomers, including limited documentation, model misconfigurations, and the complexity of workflow design. ComfyUI-Copilot addresses these challenges by offering intelligent node and model recommendations, along with automated one-click workflow construction. At its core, the system employs a hierarchical multi-agent framework comprising a central assistant agent for task delegation and specialized worker agents for different usages, supported by our curated ComfyUI knowledge bases to streamline debugging and deployment. We validate the effectiveness of ComfyUI-Copilot through both offline quantitative evaluations and online user feedback, showing that it accurately recommends nodes and accelerates workflow development. Additionally, use cases illustrate that ComfyUI-Copilot lowers entry barriers for beginners and enhances workflow efficiency for experienced users. The ComfyUI-Copilot installation package and a demo video are available at https://github.com/AIDC-AI/ComfyUI-Copilot.

With the rapid advancement of deep learning, particularly in the field of medical image analysis, an increasing number of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are being widely applied to solve complex health and biomedical challenges. However, existing research has primarily focused on specific tasks or single modalities, which limits their applicability and generalization across diverse medical scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose UMIT, a unified multi-modal, multi-task VLM designed specifically for medical imaging tasks. UMIT is able to solve various tasks, including visual question answering, disease detection, and medical report generation. In addition, it is applicable to multiple imaging modalities (e.g., X-ray, CT and PET), covering a wide range of applications from basic diagnostics to complex lesion analysis. Moreover, UMIT supports both English and Chinese, expanding its applicability globally and ensuring accessibility to healthcare services in different linguistic contexts. To enhance the model's adaptability and task-handling capability, we design a unique two-stage training strategy and fine-tune UMIT with designed instruction templates. Through extensive empirical evaluation, UMIT outperforms previous methods in five tasks across multiple datasets. The performance of UMIT indicates that it can significantly enhance diagnostic accuracy and workflow efficiency, thus providing effective solutions for medical imaging applications.

Clinical calculators play a vital role in healthcare by offering accurate evidence-based predictions for various purposes such as prognosis. Nevertheless, their widespread utilization is frequently hindered by usability challenges, poor dissemination, and restricted functionality. Augmenting large language models with extensive collections of clinical calculators presents an opportunity to overcome these obstacles and improve workflow efficiency, but the scalability of the manual curation process poses a significant challenge. In response, we introduce AgentMD, a novel language agent capable of curating and applying clinical calculators across various clinical contexts. Using the published literature, AgentMD has automatically curated a collection of 2,164 diverse clinical calculators with executable functions and structured documentation, collectively named RiskCalcs. Manual evaluations show that RiskCalcs tools achieve an accuracy of over 80% on three quality metrics. At inference time, AgentMD can automatically select and apply the relevant RiskCalcs tools given any patient description. On the newly established RiskQA benchmark, AgentMD significantly outperforms chain-of-thought prompting with GPT-4 (87.7% vs. 40.9% in accuracy). Additionally, we also applied AgentMD to real-world clinical notes for analyzing both population-level and risk-level patient characteristics. In summary, our study illustrates the utility of language agents augmented with clinical calculators for healthcare analytics and patient care.

Diagnosing and managing oral diseases necessitate advanced visual interpretation across diverse imaging modalities and integrated information synthesis. While current AI models excel at isolated tasks, they often fall short in addressing the complex, multimodal requirements of comprehensive clinical dental practice. Here we introduce DentVLM, a multimodal vision-language model engineered for expert-level oral disease diagnosis. DentVLM was developed using a comprehensive, large-scale, bilingual dataset of 110,447 images and 2.46 million visual question-answering (VQA) pairs. The model is capable of interpreting seven 2D oral imaging modalities across 36 diagnostic tasks, significantly outperforming leading proprietary and open-source models by 19.6% higher accuracy for oral diseases and 27.9% for malocclusions. In a clinical study involving 25 dentists, evaluating 1,946 patients and encompassing 3,105 QA pairs, DentVLM surpassed the diagnostic performance of 13 junior dentists on 21 of 36 tasks and exceeded that of 12 senior dentists on 12 of 36 tasks. When integrated into a collaborative workflow, DentVLM elevated junior dentists' performance to senior levels and reduced diagnostic time for all practitioners by 15-22%. Furthermore, DentVLM exhibited promising performance across three practical utility scenarios, including home-based dental health management, hospital-based intelligent diagnosis and multi-agent collaborative interaction. These findings establish DentVLM as a robust clinical decision support tool, poised to enhance primary dental care, mitigate provider-patient imbalances, and democratize access to specialized medical expertise within the field of dentistry.

Medical dictation systems are essential tools in modern healthcare, enabling accurate and efficient conversion of speech into written medical documentation. The main objective of this paper is to create a domain-specific system for Greek medical speech transcriptions. The ultimate goal is to assist healthcare professionals by reducing the overload of manual documentation and improving workflow efficiency. Towards this goal, we develop a system that combines automatic speech recognition techniques with text correction model, allowing better handling of domain-specific terminology and linguistic variations in Greek. Our approach leverages both acoustic and textual modeling to create more realistic and reliable transcriptions. We focused on adapting existing language and speech technologies to the Greek medical context, addressing challenges such as complex medical terminology and linguistic inconsistencies. Through domain-specific fine-tuning, our system achieves more accurate and coherent transcriptions, contributing to the development of practical language technologies for the Greek healthcare sector.

Recent advancements in human motion synthesis have focused on specific types of motions, such as human-scene interaction, locomotion or human-human interaction, however, there is a lack of a unified system capable of generating a diverse combination of motion types. In response, we introduce Sitcom-Crafter, a comprehensive and extendable system for human motion generation in 3D space, which can be guided by extensive plot contexts to enhance workflow efficiency for anime and game designers. The system is comprised of eight modules, three of which are dedicated to motion generation, while the remaining five are augmentation modules that ensure consistent fusion of motion sequences and system functionality. Central to the generation modules is our novel 3D scene-aware human-human interaction module, which addresses collision issues by synthesizing implicit 3D Signed Distance Function (SDF) points around motion spaces, thereby minimizing human-scene collisions without additional data collection costs. Complementing this, our locomotion and human-scene interaction modules leverage existing methods to enrich the system's motion generation capabilities. Augmentation modules encompass plot comprehension for command generation, motion synchronization for seamless integration of different motion types, hand pose retrieval to enhance motion realism, motion collision revision to prevent human collisions, and 3D retargeting to ensure visual fidelity. Experimental evaluations validate the system's ability to generate high-quality, diverse, and physically realistic motions, underscoring its potential for advancing creative workflows. Project page: https://windvchen.github.io/Sitcom-Crafter.

This paper introduces the Opus Workflow Evaluation Framework, a probabilistic-normative formulation for quantifying Workflow quality and efficiency. It integrates notions of correctness, reliability, and cost into a coherent mathematical model that enables direct comparison, scoring, and optimization of Workflows. The framework combines the Opus Workflow Reward, a probabilistic function estimating expected performance through success likelihood, resource usage, and output gain, with the Opus Workflow Normative Penalties, a set of measurable functions capturing structural and informational quality across Cohesion, Coupling, Observability, and Information Hygiene. It supports automated Workflow assessment, ranking, and optimization within modern automation systems such as Opus and can be integrated into Reinforcement Learning loops to guide Workflow discovery and refinement. In this paper, we introduce the Opus Workflow Reward model that formalizes Workflow success as a probabilistic expectation over costs and outcomes. We define measurable Opus Workflow Normative Penalties capturing structural, semantic, and signal-related properties of Workflows. Finally, we propose a unified optimization formulation for identifying and ranking optimal Workflows under joint Reward-Penalty trade-offs.

Training robust world models requires large-scale, precisely labeled multimodal datasets, a process historically bottlenecked by slow and expensive manual annotation. We present a production-tested GAZE pipeline that automates the conversion of raw, long-form video into rich, task-ready supervision for world-model training. Our system (i) normalizes proprietary 360-degree formats into standard views and shards them for parallel processing; (ii) applies a suite of AI models (scene understanding, object tracking, audio transcription, PII/NSFW/minor detection) for dense, multimodal pre-annotation; and (iii) consolidates signals into a structured output specification for rapid human validation. The GAZE workflow demonstrably yields efficiency gains (~19 minutes saved per review hour) and reduces human review volume by >80% through conservative auto-skipping of low-salience segments. By increasing label density and consistency while integrating privacy safeguards and chain-of-custody metadata, our method generates high-fidelity, privacy-aware datasets directly consumable for learning cross-modal dynamics and action-conditioned prediction. We detail our orchestration, model choices, and data dictionary to provide a scalable blueprint for generating high-quality world model training data without sacrificing throughput or governance.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) generated by large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly valuable for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications that require knowledge-intensive reasoning. However, existing KG extraction methods predominantly rely on prompt-based approaches, which are inefficient for processing large-scale corpora. These approaches often suffer from information loss, particularly with long documents, due to the lack of specialized design for KG construction. Additionally, there is a gap in evaluation datasets and methodologies for ontology-free KG construction. To overcome these limitations, we propose SynthKG, a multi-step, document-level ontology-free KG synthesis workflow based on LLMs. By fine-tuning a smaller LLM on the synthesized document-KG pairs, we streamline the multi-step process into a single-step KG generation approach called Distill-SynthKG, substantially reducing the number of LLM inference calls. Furthermore, we re-purpose existing question-answering datasets to establish KG evaluation datasets and introduce new evaluation metrics. Using KGs produced by Distill-SynthKG, we also design a novel graph-based retrieval framework for RAG. Experimental results demonstrate that Distill-SynthKG not only surpasses all baseline models in KG quality -- including models up to eight times larger -- but also consistently excels in retrieval and question-answering tasks. Our proposed graph retrieval framework also outperforms all KG-retrieval methods across multiple benchmark datasets. We release the SynthKG dataset and Distill-SynthKG model publicly to support further research and development.

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to perform web-based tasks, such as booking flights or replying to emails, where a single mistake can ruin the entire sequence of actions. A common remedy is to "warm-start" the agent by pre-training it to mimic expert demonstrations, but this is prone to overfitting. Instead, we propose to constrain exploration using demonstrations. From each demonstration, we induce high-level "workflows" which constrain the allowable actions at each time step to be similar to those in the demonstration (e.g., "Step 1: click on a textbox; Step 2: enter some text"). Our exploration policy then learns to identify successful workflows and samples actions that satisfy these workflows. Workflows prune out bad exploration directions and accelerate the agent's ability to discover rewards. We use our approach to train a novel neural policy designed to handle the semi-structured nature of websites, and evaluate on a suite of web tasks, including the recent World of Bits benchmark. We achieve new state-of-the-art results, and show that workflow-guided exploration improves sample efficiency over behavioral cloning by more than 100x.

Optimizing LLM-based agentic workflows is challenging for scaling AI capabilities. Current methods rely on coarse, end-to-end evaluation signals and lack fine-grained signals on where to refine, often resulting in inefficient or low-impact modifications. To address these limitations, we propose JudgeFlow, an Evaluation-Judge-Optimization-Update pipeline. We incorporate reusable, configurable logic blocks into agentic workflows to capture fundamental forms of logic. On top of this abstraction, we design a dedicated Judge module that inspects execution traces particularly failed runs and assigns rank-based responsibility scores to problematic blocks. These fine-grained diagnostic signals are then leveraged by an LLM-based optimizer, which focuses modifications on the most problematic block in the workflow. Our approach improves sample efficiency, enhances interpretability through block-level diagnostics, and provides a scalable foundation for automating increasingly complex agentic workflows. We evaluate JudgeFlow on mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks, where JudgeFlow achieves superior performance and efficiency compared to existing methods.

Purpose: Surgical workflow analysis is crucial for improving surgical efficiency and safety. However, previous studies rely heavily on large-scale annotated datasets, posing challenges in cost, scalability, and reliance on expert annotations. To address this, we propose Surg-FTDA (Few-shot Text-driven Adaptation), designed to handle various surgical workflow analysis tasks with minimal paired image-label data. Methods: Our approach has two key components. First, Few-shot selection-based modality alignment selects a small subset of images and aligns their embeddings with text embeddings from the downstream task, bridging the modality gap. Second, Text-driven adaptation leverages only text data to train a decoder, eliminating the need for paired image-text data. This decoder is then applied to aligned image embeddings, enabling image-related tasks without explicit image-text pairs. Results: We evaluate our approach to generative tasks (image captioning) and discriminative tasks (triplet recognition and phase recognition). Results show that Surg-FTDA outperforms baselines and generalizes well across downstream tasks. Conclusion: We propose a text-driven adaptation approach that mitigates the modality gap and handles multiple downstream tasks in surgical workflow analysis, with minimal reliance on large annotated datasets. The code and dataset will be released in https://github.com/CAMMA-public/Surg-FTDA

Multi-agent frameworks powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great success in automated planning and task execution. However, the effective adjustment of Agentic workflows during execution has not been well-studied. A effective workflow adjustment is crucial, as in many real-world scenarios, the initial plan must adjust to unforeseen challenges and changing conditions in real-time to ensure the efficient execution of complex tasks. In this paper, we define workflows as an activity-on-vertex (AOV) graphs. We continuously refine the workflow by dynamically adjusting task allocations based on historical performance and previous AOV with LLM agents. To further enhance system performance, we emphasize modularity in workflow design based on measuring parallelism and dependence complexity. Our proposed multi-agent framework achieved efficient sub-task concurrent execution, goal achievement, and error tolerance. Empirical results across different practical tasks demonstrate dramatic improvements in the efficiency of multi-agent frameworks through dynamic workflow updating and modularization.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in solving complex tasks across diverse domains, typically by employing agentic workflows that follow detailed instructions and operational sequences. However, constructing these workflows requires significant human effort, limiting scalability and generalizability. Recent research has sought to automate the generation and optimization of these workflows, but existing methods still rely on initial manual setup and fall short of achieving fully automated and effective workflow generation. To address this challenge, we reformulate workflow optimization as a search problem over code-represented workflows, where LLM-invoking nodes are connected by edges. We introduce AFlow, an automated framework that efficiently explores this space using Monte Carlo Tree Search, iteratively refining workflows through code modification, tree-structured experience, and execution feedback. Empirical evaluations across six benchmark datasets demonstrate AFlow's efficacy, yielding a 5.7% average improvement over state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, AFlow enables smaller models to outperform GPT-4o on specific tasks at 4.55% of its inference cost in dollars. The code will be available at https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.

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.

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

Analog mixed-signal circuit sizing involves complex trade-offs within high-dimensional design spaces. Existing automatic analog circuit sizing approaches rely solely on netlists, ignoring the circuit schematic, which hinders the cognitive link between the schematic and its performance. Furthermore, the black-box nature of machine learning methods and hallucination risks in large language models fail to provide the necessary ground-truth explainability required for industrial sign-off. To address these challenges, we propose a Vision Language Model-optimized collaborative agent design workflow (VLM-CAD), which analyzes circuits, optimizes DC operating points, performs inference-based sizing, and executes external sizing optimization. We integrate Image2Net to annotate circuit schematics and generate a structured JSON description for precise interpretation by Vision Language Models. Furthermore, we propose an Explainable Trust Region Bayesian Optimization method (ExTuRBO) that employs collaborative warm-start from agent-generated seeds and offers dual-granularity sensitivity analysis for external sizing optimization, supporting a comprehensive final design report. Experiment results on amplifier sizing tasks using 180nm, 90nm, and 45nm Predictive Technology Models demonstrate that VLM-CAD effectively balances power and performance while maintaining physics-based explainability. VLM-CAD meets all specification requirements while maintaining low power consumption in optimizing an amplifier with a complementary input and a class-AB output stage, with a total runtime under 66 minutes across all experiments on two amplifiers.

Large language models achieve high task performance yet often hallucinate or rely on outdated knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) addresses these gaps by coupling generation with external search. We analyse how hyperparameters influence speed and quality in RAG systems, covering Chroma and Faiss vector stores, chunking policies, cross-encoder re-ranking, and temperature, and we evaluate six metrics: faithfulness, answer correctness, answer relevancy, context precision, context recall, and answer similarity. Chroma processes queries 13% faster, whereas Faiss yields higher retrieval precision, revealing a clear speed-accuracy trade-off. Naive fixed-length chunking with small windows and minimal overlap outperforms semantic segmentation while remaining the quickest option. Re-ranking provides modest gains in retrieval quality yet increases runtime by roughly a factor of 5, so its usefulness depends on latency constraints. These results help practitioners balance computational cost and accuracy when tuning RAG systems for transparent, up-to-date responses. Finally, we re-evaluate the top configurations with a corrective RAG workflow and show that their advantages persist when the model can iteratively request additional evidence. We obtain a near-perfect context precision (99%), which demonstrates that RAG systems can achieve extremely high retrieval accuracy with the right combination of hyperparameters, with significant implications for applications where retrieval quality directly impacts downstream task performance, such as clinical decision support in healthcare.

The rise of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) promises a significant leap forward in language model capabilities, aiming to tackle increasingly sophisticated tasks with unprecedented efficiency and accuracy. However, despite their impressive performance, recent studies have highlighted how current reasoning models frequently fail to generalize to novel, unseen problems, often resorting to memorized solutions rather than genuine inferential reasoning. Such behavior underscores a critical limitation in modern LRMs, i.e., their tendency toward overfitting, which in turn results in poor generalization in problem-solving capabilities. In this paper, we introduce Nexus Architect, an enhanced iteration of our multi-agent system framework, Nexus, equipped with a novel automated workflow synthesis mechanism. Given a user's prompt and a small set of representative examples, the Architect autonomously generates a tailored reasoning workflow by selecting suitable strategies, tool integrations, and adversarial techniques for a specific problem class. Furthermore, the Architect includes an iterative prompt refinement mechanism that fine-tunes agents' system prompts to maximize performance and improve the generalization capabilities of the system. We empirically evaluate Nexus Architect by employing an off-the-shelf, non-reasoning model on a custom dataset of challenging logical questions and compare its performance against state-of-the-art LRMs. Results show that Nexus Architect consistently outperforms existing solutions, achieving up to a 66% increase in pass rate over Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview, nearly 2.5times against Claude Sonnet 4 and DeepSeek-R1, and over 3times w.r.t. Llama 4 Scout.

RF/Analog design is essential for bridging digital technologies with real-world signals, ensuring the functionality and reliability of a wide range of electronic systems. However, analog design procedures are often intricate, time-consuming and reliant on expert intuition, and hinder the time and cost efficiency of circuit development. To overcome the limitations of the manual circuit design, we introduce MenTeR - a multiagent workflow integrated into an end-to-end analog design framework. By employing multiple specialized AI agents that collaboratively address different aspects of the design process, such as specification understanding, circuit optimization, and test bench validation, MenTeR reduces the dependency on frequent trial-and-error-style intervention. MenTeR not only accelerates the design cycle time but also facilitates a broader exploration of the design space, demonstrating robust capabilities in handling real-world analog systems. We believe that MenTeR lays the groundwork for future "RF/Analog Copilots" that can collaborate seamlessly with human designers.

Camera traps have transformed how ecologists study wildlife species distributions, activity patterns, and interspecific interactions. Although camera traps provide a cost-effective method for monitoring species, the time required for data processing can limit survey efficiency. Thus, the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Deep Learning (DL), to process camera-trap data has gained considerable attention. Using DL for these applications involves training algorithms, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), to automatically detect objects and classify species. To overcome technical challenges associated with training CNNs, several research communities have recently developed platforms that incorporate DL in easy-to-use interfaces. We review key characteristics of four AI-powered platforms -- Wildlife Insights (WI), MegaDetector (MD), Machine Learning for Wildlife Image Classification (MLWIC2), and Conservation AI -- including data management tools and AI features. We also provide R code in an open-source GitBook, to demonstrate how users can evaluate model performance, and incorporate AI output in semi-automated workflows. We found that species classifications from WI and MLWIC2 generally had low recall values (animals that were present in the images often were not classified to the correct species). Yet, the precision of WI and MLWIC2 classifications for some species was high (i.e., when classifications were made, they were generally accurate). MD, which classifies images using broader categories (e.g., "blank" or "animal"), also performed well. Thus, we conclude that, although species classifiers were not accurate enough to automate image processing, DL could be used to improve efficiencies by accepting classifications with high confidence values for certain species or by filtering images containing blanks.

Recent multi-agent frameworks built upon large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex task planning. However, in real-world enterprise environments, business workflows are typically composed through modularization and reuse of numerous subprocesses, resulting in intricate workflows characterized by lengthy and deeply nested execution paths. Such complexity poses significant challenges for LLM-driven orchestration, as extended reasoning chains and state-space explosions severely impact planning effectiveness and the proper sequencing of tool invocations. Therefore, developing an orchestration method with controllable structures capable of handling multi-layer nesting becomes a critical issue. To address this, we propose a novel structure-driven orchestration framework Self-Organizing Agent Network (SOAN). SOAN incrementally builds a formalized agent network by identifying and encapsulating structural units as independent agents, enhancing modularity and clarity in orchestration. Extensive evaluations were performed using multiple benchmarks as well as a real-world enterprise workflow dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that SOAN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of adaptability, fault tolerance, and execution efficiency.

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.

Visual reasoning (VR), which is crucial in many fields for enabling human-like visual understanding, remains highly challenging. Recently, compositional visual reasoning approaches, which leverage the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) with integrated tools to solve problems, have shown promise as more effective strategies than end-to-end VR methods. However, these approaches face limitations, as frozen LLMs lack tool awareness in VR, leading to performance bottlenecks. While leveraging LLMs for reasoning is widely used in other domains, they are not directly applicable to VR due to limited training data, imperfect tools that introduce errors and reduce data collection efficiency in VR, and challenging in fine-tuning on noisy workflows. To address these challenges, we propose DWIM: i) Discrepancy-aware training Workflow generation, which assesses tool usage and extracts more viable workflows for training; and ii) Instruct-Masking fine-tuning, which guides the model to only clone effective actions, enabling the generation of more practical solutions. Our experiments demonstrate that DWIM achieves state-of-the-art performance across various VR tasks, exhibiting strong generalization on multiple widely-used datasets.

While powerful, the inherent non-determinism of large language model (LLM) agents limits their application in structured operational environments where procedural fidelity and predictable execution are strict requirements. This limitation stems from current architectures that conflate probabilistic, high-level planning with low-level action execution within a single generative process. To address this, we introduce the Source Code Agent framework, a new paradigm built on the "Blueprint First, Model Second" philosophy. Our framework decouples the workflow logic from the generative model. An expert-defined operational procedure is first codified into a source code-based Execution Blueprint, which is then executed by a deterministic engine. The LLM is strategically invoked as a specialized tool to handle bounded, complex sub-tasks within the workflow, but never to decide the workflow's path. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on the challenging tau-bench benchmark, designed for complex user-tool-rule scenarios. Our results demonstrate that the Source Code Agent establishes a new state-of-the-art, outperforming the strongest baseline by 10.1 percentage points on the average Pass^1 score while dramatically improving execution efficiency. Our work enables the verifiable and reliable deployment of autonomous agents in applications governed by strict procedural logic.

This paper introduces a parallel and asynchronous Transformer framework designed for efficient and accurate multilingual lip synchronization in real-time video conferencing systems. The proposed architecture integrates translation, speech processing, and lip-synchronization modules within a pipeline-parallel design that enables concurrent module execution through message-queue-based decoupling, reducing end-to-end latency by up to 3.1 times compared to sequential approaches. To enhance computational efficiency and throughput, the inference workflow of each module is optimized through low-level graph compilation, mixed-precision quantization, and hardware-accelerated kernel fusion. These optimizations provide substantial gains in efficiency while preserving model accuracy and visual quality. In addition, a context-adaptive silence-detection component segments the input speech stream at semantically coherent boundaries, improving translation consistency and temporal alignment across languages. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed parallel architecture outperforms conventional sequential pipelines in processing speed, synchronization stability, and resource utilization. The modular, message-oriented design makes this work applicable to resource-constrained IoT communication scenarios including telemedicine, multilingual kiosks, and remote assistance systems. Overall, this work advances the development of low-latency, resource-efficient multimodal communication frameworks for next-generation AIoT systems.

Agentic AI enables LLM to dynamically reason, plan, and interact with tools to solve complex tasks. However, agentic workflows often require many iterative reasoning steps and tool invocations, leading to significant operational expense, end-to-end latency and failures due to hallucinations. This work introduces Agent Workflow Optimization (AWO), a framework that identifies and optimizes redundant tool execution patterns to improve the efficiency and robustness of agentic workflows. AWO analyzes existing workflow traces to discover recurring sequences of tool calls and transforms them into meta-tools, which are deterministic, composite tools that bundle multiple agent actions into a single invocation. Meta-tools bypass unnecessary intermediate LLM reasoning steps and reduce operational cost while also shortening execution paths, leading to fewer failures. Experiments on two agentic AI benchmarks show that AWO reduces the number of LLM calls up to 11.9% while also increasing the task success rate by up to 4.2 percent points.

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.

LLM-based evolution has emerged as a promising way to improve agents by refining non-parametric artifacts, but its wall-clock cost remains a major bottleneck. We identify that this cost comes from synchronized stage execution and imbalance inside each LLM-heavy stage. We present FlashEvolve, an efficient framework that replaces synchronized execution with asynchronous workers and queues, allowing different stages and steps to overlap. To handle data staleness introduced by asynchrony, FlashEvolve tracks artifact versions and applies different policies to update, discard, or patch stale artifacts. Unlike weight-space staleness in asynchronous RL, language-space staleness is inspectable and repairable: a stale artifact is not just delayed work, but readable evidence that the LLM can reflect on, revise, and turn into useful evolution signal. FlashEvolve further improves throughput and token efficiency with speculative stage completion and adaptive workflow control. On GEPA workloads, FlashEvolve improves proposal throughput by 3.5times on local vLLM and 4.9times on API serving over synchronous GEPA. The same design also applies to ACE and Meta-Harness.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) demonstrate their effectiveness in scaling test-time compute for software engineering tasks. However, these approaches often focus on high-level solutions, with limited attention to optimizing low-level CUDA kernel implementations. Additionally, existing kernel generation benchmarks suffer from exploitable loopholes and insufficient diversity in testing conditions, hindering true generalization assessment. To address these limitations, we introduce robust-kbench, a new benchmark for rigorous evaluation of kernel performance and correctness across varied scenarios. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive agentic framework that automates CUDA kernel discovery, verification, and optimization. This pipeline enables frontier LLMs to translate torch code to CUDA kernels and iteratively improve their runtime within our robust evaluation setting. Our sequential workflow first translates PyTorch code into equivalent CUDA kernels. It then optimizes their runtime using a novel evolutionary meta-generation procedure tailored to the CUDA ecosystem, guided by LLM-based verifiers for correctness and efficient filtering. Evaluated on robust-kbench, our approach produces CUDA kernels outperforming torch implementations for practical applications, including forward and backward passes. It can fuse operations and deploy various runtime optimization strategies. The verifier workflow accurately classifies incorrect kernels, enhancing hardware verification efficiency.

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

Agentic LLM frameworks that rely on prompted orchestration, where the model itself determines workflow transitions, often suffer from hallucinated routing, infinite loops, and non-reproducible execution. We introduce GraphBit, an engine-orchestrated framework that defines workflows explicitly and deterministically as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Unlike prompted orchestration, agents in GraphBit operate as typed functions, while a Rust-based engine governs routing, state transitions, and tool invocation, ensuring reproducibility and auditability. The engine supports parallel branch execution, conditional control flow over structured state predicates, and configurable error recovery. A three-tier memory architecture consisting of ephemeral scratch space, structured state, and external connectors isolates context across stages, preventing cascading context bloat that degrades reasoning in long-running pipelines. Across GAIA benchmark tasks spanning zero-tool, document-augmented, and web-enabled workflows, GraphBit outperforms six existing frameworks, achieving the highest accuracy (67.6 percent), zero framework-induced hallucinations, the lowest latency (11.9 ms overhead), and the highest throughput. Ablation studies demonstrate that each memory tier contributes measurably to performance, with deterministic execution providing the greatest gains on tool-intensive tasks representative of real-world deployments.

Large language model (LLM) based agentic workflows have become a popular paradigm for coordinating multiple specialized agents to solve complex tasks. To improve serving efficiency, existing LLM systems employ prefix caching to reuse key-value (KV) tensors corresponding to agents' fixed prompts, thereby avoiding redundant computation across repeated invocations. However, current systems typically evict KV caches using a Least Recently Used (LRU) policy, which fails to anticipate future agent usage and often discards KV caches shortly before their reuse. This leads to frequent cache misses and substantial recomputation or swapping overhead. We present KVFlow, a workflow-aware KV cache management framework tailored for agentic workloads. KVFlow abstracts the agent execution schedule as an Agent Step Graph and assigns each agent a steps-to-execution value that estimates its temporal proximity to future activation. These values guide a fine-grained eviction policy at the KV node level, allowing KVFlow to preserve entries likely to be reused and efficiently manage shared prefixes in tree-structured caches. Moreover, KVFlow introduces a fully overlapped KV prefetching mechanism, which proactively loads required tensors from CPU to GPU in background threads for agents scheduled in the next step, thereby avoiding cache miss stalls during generation. Compared to SGLang with hierarchical radix cache, KVFlow achieves up to 1.83times speedup for single workflows with large prompts, and up to 2.19times speedup for scenarios with many concurrent workflows.

Machine-learned interatomic potentials are revolutionising atomistic materials simulations by providing accurate and scalable predictions within the scope covered by the training data. However, generation of an accurate and robust training data set remains a challenge, often requiring thousands of first-principles calculations to achieve high accuracy. Foundation models have started to emerge with the ambition to create universally applicable potentials across a wide range of materials. While foundation models can be robust and transferable, they do not yet achieve the accuracy required to predict reaction barriers, phase transitions, and material stability. This work demonstrates that foundation model potentials can reach chemical accuracy when fine-tuned using transfer learning with partially frozen weights and biases. For two challenging datasets on reactive chemistry at surfaces and stability and elastic properties of tertiary alloys, we show that frozen transfer learning with 10-20% of the data (hundreds of datapoints) achieves similar accuracies to models trained from scratch (on thousands of datapoints). Moreover, we show that an equally accurate, but significantly more efficient surrogate model can be built using the transfer learned potential as the ground truth. In combination, we present a simulation workflow for machine learning potentials that improves data efficiency and computational efficiency.

LLM routing has achieved promising results in integrating the strengths of diverse models while balancing efficiency and performance. However, to support more realistic and challenging applications, routing must extend into agentic LLM settings, where task planning, multi-round cooperation among heterogeneous agents, and memory utilization are indispensable. To address this gap, we propose GraphPlanner, a heterogeneous graph memory-augmented agentic router for multi-agent LLMs that generates routing workflows for each query and supports both inductive and transductive inference. GraphPlanner formulates workflow generation as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), where at each step it selects both the LLM backbone and the agent role, including Planner, Executor, and Summarizer. By leveraging a heterogeneous graph, denoted as GARNet, to capture interaction memories among queries, agents, and responses, GraphPlanner integrates historical memory and workflow memory into richer state representations. The entire pipeline is optimized with reinforcement learning, jointly improving task-specific performance and computational efficiency. We evaluate GraphPlanner across 14 diverse LLM tasks and demonstrate that: (1) GraphPlanner outperforms strong single-round and multi-round routers, improving accuracy by up to 9.3% while reducing GPU cost from 186.26 GiB to 1.04 GiB; (2) GraphPlanner generalizes robustly to unseen tasks and LLMs, exhibiting strong zero-shot capabilities; and (3) GraphPlanner effectively leverages historical memories, supporting both inductive and transductive inference for more adaptive routing. Our code for GraphPlanner is released at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/GraphPlanner.

Motion in-betweening is one of the most artistically demanding and time consuming stages of 3D animation, where the expressivity and rhythm of motion are defined. The level of creative control it requires makes it a major production bottleneck, underscoring the need for intelligent tools that assist animators in this process. Although recent deep learning approaches have achieved strong results in motion synthesis and in-betweening, they assume data characteristics, motion styles, and problem formulations that diverge from professional animation workflows. To bridge this gap, we propose a method explicitly aligned with the constraints of motion in-betweening for keyframe-based animation in production environments. At its core, the Adaptive Interpolation-Synthesis (AIS) layer mirrors the animator's creative process by dynamically balancing learned interpolation and direct pose synthesis. In addition, a domain-based input keypose schedule reflects the distribution of production data, improving stylistic consistency and alignment between training and real-world usage. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on production data; when integrated into Autodesk Maya, it enables animators to complete in-betweening tasks with a 3.5x speedup.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks when equipped with external tools. However, current frameworks predominantly rely on sequential processing, leading to inefficient execution particularly for tasks requiring extensive tool interaction. This paper introduces Flash-Searcher, a novel parallel agent reasoning framework that fundamentally reimagines the execution paradigm from sequential chains to directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Flash-Searcher decomposes complex tasks into subtasks with explicit dependencies, enabling concurrent execution of independent reasoning paths while maintaining logical constraints. Through dynamic workflow optimization, our framework continuously refines the execution graph based on intermediate results, effectively integrating summary module. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Flash-Searcher consistently outperforms existing approaches. Specifically, it achieves 67.7% accuracy on BrowseComp and 83% on xbench-DeepSearch, while reducing agent execution steps by up to 35% compared to current frameworks. Furthermore, when distilling this parallel reasoning pipeline into single models, we observe substantial performance gains across diverse backbone architectures, underscoring the generalizability of our methodology. Our work thus represents a significant advance in agent architecture design, offering a more scalable and efficient paradigm for complex reasoning tasks.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown significant autonomous capabilities in dynamically searching and incorporating relevant tools or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for individual queries. However, fixed context windows limit effectiveness in multi-turn interactions requiring repeated, independent tool usage. We introduce MemTool, a short-term memory framework enabling LLM agents to dynamically manage tools or MCP server contexts across multi-turn conversations. MemTool offers three agentic architectures: 1) Autonomous Agent Mode, granting full tool management autonomy, 2) Workflow Mode, providing deterministic control without autonomy, and 3) Hybrid Mode, combining autonomous and deterministic control. Evaluating each MemTool mode across 13+ LLMs on the ScaleMCP benchmark, we conducted experiments over 100 consecutive user interactions, measuring tool removal ratios (short-term memory efficiency) and task completion accuracy. In Autonomous Agent Mode, reasoning LLMs achieve high tool-removal efficiency (90-94% over a 3-window average), while medium-sized models exhibit significantly lower efficiency (0-60%). Workflow and Hybrid modes consistently manage tool removal effectively, whereas Autonomous and Hybrid modes excel at task completion. We present trade-offs and recommendations for each MemTool mode based on task accuracy, agency, and model capabilities.

The evolution of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shifted from static retrieval pipelines to dynamic, agentic workflows where a central planner orchestrates multi-turn reasoning. However, existing paradigms face a critical dichotomy: they either optimize modules jointly within rigid, fixed-graph architectures, or empower dynamic planning while treating executors as frozen, black-box tools. We identify that this decoupled optimization creates a ``strategic-operational mismatch,'' where sophisticated planning strategies fail to materialize due to unadapted local executors, often leading to negative performance gains despite increased system complexity. In this paper, we propose JADE (Joint Agentic Dynamic Execution), a unified framework for the joint optimization of planning and execution within dynamic, multi-turn workflows. By modeling the system as a cooperative multi-agent team unified under a single shared backbone, JADE enables end-to-end learning driven by outcome-based rewards. This approach facilitates co-adaptation: the planner learns to operate within the capability boundaries of the executors, while the executors evolve to align with high-level strategic intent. Empirical results demonstrate that JADE transforms disjoint modules into a synergistic system, yielding remarkable performance improvements via joint optimization and enabling a flexible balance between efficiency and effectiveness through dynamic workflow orchestration.

Business intelligence (BI) transforms large volumes of data within modern organizations into actionable insights for informed decision-making. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based agents have streamlined the BI workflow by automatically performing task planning, reasoning, and actions in executable environments based on natural language (NL) queries. However, existing approaches primarily focus on individual BI tasks such as NL2SQL and NL2VIS. The fragmentation of tasks across different data roles and tools lead to inefficiencies and potential errors due to the iterative and collaborative nature of BI. In this paper, we introduce DataLab, a unified BI platform that integrates a one-stop LLM-based agent framework with an augmented computational notebook interface. DataLab supports a wide range of BI tasks for different data roles by seamlessly combining LLM assistance with user customization within a single environment. To achieve this unification, we design a domain knowledge incorporation module tailored for enterprise-specific BI tasks, an inter-agent communication mechanism to facilitate information sharing across the BI workflow, and a cell-based context management strategy to enhance context utilization efficiency in BI notebooks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DataLab achieves state-of-the-art performance on various BI tasks across popular research benchmarks. Moreover, DataLab maintains high effectiveness and efficiency on real-world datasets from Tencent, achieving up to a 58.58% increase in accuracy and a 61.65% reduction in token cost on enterprise-specific BI tasks.

Checkpointing to preserve training states is crucial during the development of Large Foundation Models (LFMs), for training resumption upon various failures or changes in GPU resources and parallelism configurations. In addition, saved checkpoints are dispatched to evaluation tasks or transferred across different training stages (e.g., from pre-training to post-training). All these scenarios require resharding distributed checkpoints from one parallelism to another. In production environments, different LFMs are trained with various frameworks and storage backends, depending on model sizes and training scales. A high-performance checkpointing system is needed to enable efficient checkpoint management at scale throughout the lifecycle of LFM development. We introduce ByteCheckpoint, an industrial-grade checkpointing system for large-scale LFM training. ByteCheckpoint features: a parallelism-agnostic checkpoint representation that enables efficient load-time checkpoint resharding; a generic checkpoint saving/loading workflow to accommodate multiple training frameworks and support different storage backends; full-stack optimizations to ensure high I/O efficiency and scalability; a suite of monitoring tools to streamline large-scale performance analysis and bottleneck detection. Compared to existing open-source checkpointing systems [52, 58], ByteCheckpoint significantly reduces runtime checkpoint stalls, achieving an average reduction of 54.20x. For saving and loading times, ByteCheckpoint achieves improvements of up to 9.96x and 8.80x, respectively.

In the current digital era, the rapid spread of misinformation on online platforms presents significant challenges to societal well-being, public trust, and democratic processes, influencing critical decision making and public opinion. To address these challenges, there is a growing need for automated fake news detection mechanisms. Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, prompting exploration into their potential for verifying news claims. Instead of employing LLMs in a non-agentic way, where LLMs generate responses based on direct prompts in a single shot, our work introduces FactAgent, an agentic approach of utilizing LLMs for fake news detection. FactAgent enables LLMs to emulate human expert behavior in verifying news claims without any model training, following a structured workflow. This workflow breaks down the complex task of news veracity checking into multiple sub-steps, where LLMs complete simple tasks using their internal knowledge or external tools. At the final step of the workflow, LLMs integrate all findings throughout the workflow to determine the news claim's veracity. Compared to manual human verification, FactAgent offers enhanced efficiency. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of FactAgent in verifying claims without the need for any training process. Moreover, FactAgent provides transparent explanations at each step of the workflow and during final decision-making, offering insights into the reasoning process of fake news detection for end users. FactAgent is highly adaptable, allowing for straightforward updates to its tools that LLMs can leverage within the workflow, as well as updates to the workflow itself using domain knowledge. This adaptability enables FactAgent's application to news verification across various domains.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for applying multi-agent systems in very large-scale simulations. However, there remain several challenges when conducting multi-agent simulations with existing platforms, such as limited scalability and low efficiency, unsatisfied agent diversity, and effort-intensive management processes. To address these challenges, we develop several new features and components for AgentScope, a user-friendly multi-agent platform, enhancing its convenience and flexibility for supporting very large-scale multi-agent simulations. Specifically, we propose an actor-based distributed mechanism as the underlying technological infrastructure towards great scalability and high efficiency, and provide flexible environment support for simulating various real-world scenarios, which enables parallel execution of multiple agents, centralized workflow orchestration, and both inter-agent and agent-environment interactions among agents. Moreover, we integrate an easy-to-use configurable tool and an automatic background generation pipeline in AgentScope, simplifying the process of creating agents with diverse yet detailed background settings. Last but not least, we provide a web-based interface for conveniently monitoring and managing a large number of agents that might deploy across multiple devices. We conduct a comprehensive simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancements in AgentScope, and provide detailed observations and discussions to highlight the great potential of applying multi-agent systems in large-scale simulations. The source code is released on GitHub at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope to inspire further research and development in large-scale multi-agent simulations.

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.

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

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in extending large language models into agentic systems. While the effectiveness of agents has continued to improve, efficiency, which is crucial for real-world deployment, has often been overlooked. This paper therefore investigates efficiency from three core components of agents: memory, tool learning, and planning, considering costs such as latency, tokens, steps, etc. Aimed at conducting comprehensive research addressing the efficiency of the agentic system itself, we review a broad range of recent approaches that differ in implementation yet frequently converge on shared high-level principles including but not limited to bounding context via compression and management, designing reinforcement learning rewards to minimize tool invocation, and employing controlled search mechanisms to enhance efficiency, which we discuss in detail. Accordingly, we characterize efficiency in two complementary ways: comparing effectiveness under a fixed cost budget, and comparing cost at a comparable level of effectiveness. This trade-off can also be viewed through the Pareto frontier between effectiveness and cost. From this perspective, we also examine efficiency oriented benchmarks by summarizing evaluation protocols for these components and consolidating commonly reported efficiency metrics from both benchmark and methodological studies. Moreover, we discuss the key challenges and future directions, with the goal of providing promising insights.

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.

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.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on large language models typically solve complex tasks by coordinating multiple agents through workflows. Existing approaches generates workflows either at task level or query level, but their relative costs and benefits remain unclear. After rethinking and empirical analyses, we show that query-level workflow generation is not always necessary, since a small set of top-K best task-level workflows together already covers equivalent or even more queries. We further find that exhaustive execution-based task-level evaluation is both extremely token-costly and frequently unreliable. Inspired by the idea of self-evolution and generative reward modeling, we propose a low-cost task-level generation framework SCALE, which means \textbf{S}elf prediction of the optimizer with few shot \textbf{CAL}ibration for \textbf{E}valuation instead of full validation execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCALE maintains competitive performance, with an average degradation of just 0.61\% compared to existing approach across multiple datasets, while cutting overall token usage by up to 83\%.

Workflows are a fundamental component of automation in enterprise platforms, enabling the orchestration of tasks, data processing, and system integrations. Despite being widely used, building workflows can be complex, often requiring manual configuration through low-code platforms or visual programming tools. To simplify this process, we explore the use of generative foundation models, particularly vision-language models (VLMs), to automatically generate structured workflows from visual inputs. Translating hand-drawn sketches or computer-generated diagrams into executable workflows is challenging due to the ambiguity of free-form drawings, variations in diagram styles, and the difficulty of inferring execution logic from visual elements. To address this, we introduce StarFlow, a framework for generating structured workflow outputs from sketches using vision-language models. We curate a diverse dataset of workflow diagrams -- including synthetic, manually annotated, and real-world samples -- to enable robust training and evaluation. We finetune and benchmark multiple vision-language models, conducting a series of ablation studies to analyze the strengths and limitations of our approach. Our results show that finetuning significantly enhances structured workflow generation, outperforming large vision-language models on this task.

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs), with their exceptional ability to handle a wide range of tasks, have driven significant advancements in tackling reasoning and planning tasks, wherein decomposing complex problems into executable workflows is a crucial step in this process. Existing workflow evaluation frameworks either focus solely on holistic performance or suffer from limitations such as restricted scenario coverage, simplistic workflow structures, and lax evaluation standards. To this end, we introduce WorFBench, a unified workflow generation benchmark with multi-faceted scenarios and intricate graph workflow structures. Additionally, we present WorFEval, a systemic evaluation protocol utilizing subsequence and subgraph matching algorithms to accurately quantify the LLM agent's workflow generation capabilities. Through comprehensive evaluations across different types of LLMs, we discover distinct gaps between the sequence planning capabilities and graph planning capabilities of LLM agents, with even GPT-4 exhibiting a gap of around 15%. We also train two open-source models and evaluate their generalization abilities on held-out tasks. Furthermore, we observe that the generated workflows can enhance downstream tasks, enabling them to achieve superior performance with less time during inference. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/WorFBench.

Traditional banks face increasing competition from FinTechs in the rapidly evolving financial ecosystem. Raising operational efficiency is vital to address this challenge. Our study aims to improve the efficiency of document-intensive business processes in banking. To that end, we first review the landscape of business documents in the retail segment. Banking documents often contain text, layout, and visuals, suggesting that document analytics and process automation require more than plain natural language processing (NLP). To verify this and assess the incremental value of visual cues when processing business documents, we compare a recently proposed multimodal model called LayoutXLM to powerful text classifiers (e.g., BERT) and large language models (e.g., GPT) in a case study related to processing company register extracts. The results confirm that incorporating layout information in a model substantially increases its performance. Interestingly, we also observed that more than 75% of the best model performance (in terms of the F1 score) can be achieved with as little as 30% of the training data. This shows that the demand for data labeled data to set up a multi-modal model can be moderate, which simplifies real-world applications of multimodal document analytics. Our study also sheds light on more specific practices in the scope of calibrating a multimodal banking document classifier, including the need for fine-tuning. In sum, the paper contributes original empirical evidence on the effectiveness and efficiency of multi-model models for document processing in the banking business and offers practical guidance on how to unlock this potential in day-to-day operations.

LLM-based agents have emerged as promising tools, which are crafted to fulfill complex tasks by iterative planning and action. However, these agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. To address this, preliminary attempts are made to enhance planning reliability by incorporating external workflow-related knowledge. Despite the promise, such infused knowledge is mostly disorganized and diverse in formats, lacking rigorous formalization and comprehensive comparisons. Motivated by this, we formalize different formats of workflow knowledge and present FlowBench, the first benchmark for workflow-guided planning. FlowBench covers 51 different scenarios from 6 domains, with knowledge presented in diverse formats. To assess different LLMs on FlowBench, we design a multi-tiered evaluation framework. We evaluate the efficacy of workflow knowledge across multiple formats, and the results indicate that current LLM agents need considerable improvements for satisfactory planning. We hope that our challenging benchmark can pave the way for future agent planning research.

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.

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly Code LLMs, have demonstrated impressive performance in code generation. Current research primarily focuses on the correctness of generated code, while efficiency remains less explored. Recent works have focused on modifying the initial version of the code to improve its efficiency. However, such refinements are limited by the algorithmic design and overall logic of the initial code, resulting in only incremental improvements. In contrast, when human developers write high-quality code, they typically begin by designing several potential solutions at the logical level, evaluating various algorithms and their complexities, and then proceeding to implement and optimize the solution. In this study, we introduce \tool: Large Language Model for Code Efficiency, a novel framework that enables LLMs to generate code that balances both efficiency and correctness. Specifically, \tool divides the efficiency optimization process into two domains: algorithmic exploration in the logic domain and implementation optimization in the code domain. The correctness of the code is then guaranteed through a synthetic test case refinement process. This approach, which prioritizes efficiency before ensuring correctness, offers a new paradigm for efficient code generation. Experiments demonstrate that \tool consistently improves both efficiency and correctness, achieving new state-of-the-art performance in code efficiency benchmarks across various LLM backbones.

We introduce the Agent GPA (Goal-Plan-Action) framework: an evaluation paradigm based on an agent's operational loop of setting goals, devising plans, and executing actions. The framework includes five evaluation metrics: Goal Fulfillment, Logical Consistency, Execution Efficiency, Plan Quality, and Plan Adherence. Logical Consistency checks that an agent's actions are consistent with its prior actions. Execution Efficiency checks whether the agent executes in the most efficient way to achieve its goal. Plan Quality checks whether an agent's plans are aligned with its goals; Plan Adherence checks if an agent's actions are aligned with its plan; and Goal Fulfillment checks that agent's final outcomes match the stated goals. Our experimental results on two benchmark datasets - the public TRAIL/GAIA dataset and an internal dataset for a production-grade data agent - show that this framework (a) provides a systematic way to cover a broad range of agent failures, including all agent errors on the TRAIL/GAIA benchmark dataset; (b) supports LLM-judges that exhibit strong agreement with human annotation, covering 80% to over 95% errors; and (c) localizes errors with 86% agreement to enable targeted improvement of agent performance.

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.

As unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) continue to integrate into the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS), there is a need to quantify the risk of airborne collisions between unmanned and manned aircraft to support regulation and standards development. Developing and certifying collision avoidance systems often rely on the extensive use of Monte Carlo collision risk analysis simulations using probabilistic models of aircraft flight. To train these models, high performance computing resources are required. We've prototyped a high performance computing workflow designed and deployed on the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center to process billions of observations of aircraft. However, the prototype has various computational and storage bottlenecks that limited rapid or more comprehensive analyses and models. In response, we have developed a novel workflow to take advantage of various job launch and task distribution technologies to improve performance. The workflow was benchmarked using two datasets of observations of aircraft, including a new dataset focused on the environment around aerodromes. Optimizing how the workflow was parallelized drastically reduced the execution time from weeks to days.

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM)-driven agents have enabled sophisticated systems to tackle complex, multi-step tasks, but their escalating costs threaten scalability and accessibility. This work presents the first systematic study of the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off in modern agent systems, addressing the critical need for cost-effective designs without sacrificing performance. We investigate three key questions: (1) How much complexity do agentic tasks inherently require? (2) When do additional modules yield diminishing returns? (3) How much efficiency can be gained through the design of efficient agent frameworks? Through an empirical analysis on the GAIA benchmark, we evaluate the impact of LLM backbone selection, agent framework designs, and test-time scaling strategies. Using the cost-of-pass metric, we quantify the efficiency-performance trade-off across these dimensions. Our findings inform the development of Efficient Agents , a novel agent framework that has an optimal complexity to task requirements. Efficient Agents retains 96.7% of the performance of OWL, one leading open-source agent framework, while reducing operational costs from 0.398 to 0.228, resulting in a 28.4% improvement in cost-of-pass. Our work provides actionable insights for designing efficient, high-performing agent systems, advancing the accessibility and sustainability of AI-driven solutions.

This paper introduces Workflow Intention, a novel framework for identifying and encoding process objectives within complex business environments. Workflow Intention is the alignment of Input, Process and Output elements defining a Workflow's transformation objective interpreted from Workflow Signal inside Business Artefacts. It specifies how Input is processed to achieve desired Output, incorporating quality standards, business rules, compliance requirements and constraints. We adopt an end-to-end Business Artefact Encoder and Workflow Signal interpretation methodology involving four steps: Modality-Specific Encoding, Intra-Modality Attention, Inter-Modality Fusion Attention then Intention Decoding. We provide training procedures and critical loss function definitions. In this paper we introduce the concepts of Workflow Signal and Workflow Intention, where Workflow Signal decomposed into Input, Process and Output elements is interpreted from Business Artefacts, and Workflow Intention is a complete triple of these elements. We introduce a mathematical framework for representing Workflow Signal as a vector and Workflow Intention as a tensor, formalizing properties of these objects. Finally, we propose a modular, scalable, trainable, attention-based multimodal generative system to resolve Workflow Intention from Business Artefacts.

Code efficiency is a fundamental aspect of software quality, yet how to harness large language models (LLMs) to optimize programs remains challenging. Prior approaches have sought for one-shot rewriting, retrieved exemplars, or prompt-based search, but they do not explicitly distill reusable optimization knowledge, which limits generalization beyond individual instances. In this paper, we present EffiSkill, a framework for code-efficiency optimization that builds a portable optimization toolbox for LLM-based agents. The key idea is to model recurring slow-to-fast transformations as reusable agent skills that capture both concrete transformation mechanisms and higher-level optimization strategies. EffiSkill adopts a two-stage design: Stage I mines Operator and Meta Skills from large-scale slow/fast program pairs to build a skill library; Stage II applies this library to unseen programs through execution-free diagnosis, skill retrieval, plan composition, and candidate generation, without runtime feedback. Results on EffiBench-X show that EffiSkill achieves higher optimization success rates, improving over the strongest baseline by 3.69 to 12.52 percentage points across model and language settings. These findings suggest that mechanism-level skill reuse provides a useful foundation for execution-free code optimization, and that the resulting skill library can serve as a reusable resource for broader agent workflows.

Existing AI benchmarks for software automation rarely combine cross-application coordination, autonomous API discovery, and policy adherence. Real business workflows demand all three: a single task may span a CRM, inbox, calendar, and messaging platform - requiring the agent to find the right endpoints, follow a policy document, and write correct data to each system. To address this gap, we introduce AutomationBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on cross-application workflow orchestration via REST APIs. Drawing on real workflow patterns from Zapier's platform, tasks span Sales, Marketing, Operations, Support, Finance, and HR domains. Agents must discover relevant endpoints themselves, follow layered business rules, and navigate environments with irrelevant and sometimes misleading records. Grading is programmatic and end-state only: whether the correct data ended up in the right systems. Even the best frontier models currently score below 10%. AutomationBench provides a challenging, realistic measure of where current models stand relative to the agentic capabilities businesses actually need.

We introduce MMBench-GUI, a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating GUI automation agents across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and Web platforms. It comprises four levels: GUI Content Understanding, Element Grounding, Task Automation, and Task Collaboration, covering essential skills for GUI agents. In addition, we propose a novel Efficiency-Quality Area (EQA) metric to assess GUI agent execution efficiency in online automation scenarios. Through MMBench-GUI, we identify accurate visual grounding as a critical determinant of overall task success, emphasizing the substantial benefits of modular frameworks that integrate specialized grounding modules. Furthermore, to achieve reliable GUI automation, an agent requires strong task planning and cross-platform generalization abilities, with long-context memory, a broad action space, and long-term reasoning playing a critical role. More important, task efficiency remains a critically underexplored dimension, and all models suffer from substantial inefficiencies, with excessive redundant steps even when tasks are ultimately completed. The integration of precise localization, effective planning, and early stopping strategies is indispensable to enable truly efficient and scalable GUI automation. Our benchmark code, evaluation data, and running environment will be publicly available at https://github.com/open-compass/MMBench-GUI.

This paper introduces the Opus Prompt Intention Framework, designed to improve complex Workflow Generation with instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs). We propose an intermediate Intention Capture layer between user queries and Workflow Generation, implementing the Opus Workflow Intention Framework, which consists of extracting Workflow Signals from user queries, interpreting them into structured Workflow Intention objects, and generating Workflows based on these Intentions. Our results show that this layer enables LLMs to produce logical and meaningful outputs that scale reliably as query complexity increases. On a synthetic benchmark of 1,000 multi-intent query-Workflow(s) pairs, applying the Opus Prompt Intention Framework to Workflow Generation yields consistent improvements in semantic Workflow similarity metrics. In this paper, we introduce the Opus Prompt Intention Framework by applying the concepts of Workflow Signal and Workflow Intention to LLM-driven Workflow Generation. We present a reproducible, customizable LLM-based Intention Capture system to extract Workflow Signals and Workflow Intentions from user queries. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that the proposed system significantly improves Workflow Generation quality compared to direct generation from user queries, particularly in cases of Mixed Intention Elicitation.

The practical use of text-to-image generation has evolved from simple, monolithic models to complex workflows that combine multiple specialized components. While workflow-based approaches can lead to improved image quality, crafting effective workflows requires significant expertise, owing to the large number of available components, their complex inter-dependence, and their dependence on the generation prompt. Here, we introduce the novel task of prompt-adaptive workflow generation, where the goal is to automatically tailor a workflow to each user prompt. We propose two LLM-based approaches to tackle this task: a tuning-based method that learns from user-preference data, and a training-free method that uses the LLM to select existing flows. Both approaches lead to improved image quality when compared to monolithic models or generic, prompt-independent workflows. Our work shows that prompt-dependent flow prediction offers a new pathway to improving text-to-image generation quality, complementing existing research directions in the field.

Like any other discipline, Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted software engineering by helping developers generate the required artifacts across various phases of software development. This paper presents a case study comparing the performance of popular LLMs GPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek in generating functional specifications that include use cases, business rules, and collaborative workflows for a web application, the Mess Management System. The study evaluated the quality of LLM generated use cases, business rules, and collaborative workflows in terms of their syntactic and semantic correctness, consistency, non ambiguity, and completeness compared to the reference specifications against the zero-shot prompted problem statement. Our results suggested that all four LLMs can specify syntactically and semantically correct, mostly non-ambiguous artifacts. Still, they may be inconsistent at times and may differ significantly in the completeness of the generated specification. Claude and Gemini generated all the reference use cases, with Claude achieving the most complete but somewhat redundant use case specifications. Similar results were obtained for specifying workflows. However, all four LLMs struggled to generate relevant Business Rules, with DeepSeek generating the most reference rules but with less completeness. Overall, Claude generated more complete specification artifacts, while Gemini was more precise in the specifications it generated.

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/.

LLM agents are rapidly evolving from coding assistants into autonomous software engineering systems. However, existing evaluation methodologies remain largely centered on static, isolated, and short-horizon benchmarks that fail to capture the dynamic complexity of real-world production workflows. As a result, benchmark performance may poorly reflect practical capability under realistic runtime environments involving long execution chains, tool interactions, dependency management, and iterative feedback loops. We thus present RAMP, a production-grounded infrastructure for assessing long-horizon software engineering agents. Built upon the YatCC integrated platform, RAMP provides a unified runtime assessment architecture through standardized orchestration and execution interfaces. RAMP introduces realistic compiler-construction workloads with serial dependencies and complex toolchain interactions, together with a staged recovery mechanism for analyzing execution behavior under partial workflow failure. The framework further incorporates utility-oriented multi-dimensional metrics that jointly evaluate outcome quality and process efficiency. We conduct runtime assessments across 15 mainstream models and observe substantial capability degradation that remains largely invisible to conventional isolated benchmarks. Task completion rates progressively collapse across serial workflows, dropping from 100% in the initial stage to only 20% in the final stage, while none of the evaluated models successfully completes the entire pipeline. Runtime analysis reveals systematic failure propagation and significant resource inefficiencies, with computational costs differing by up to three orders of magnitude among comparable models. These findings suggest RAMP advances agentic model evaluation toward continuous, runtime-observable, and production-grounded assessment.

Existing code generation benchmarks primarily evaluate functional correctness, with limited focus on code efficiency and often restricted to a single language like Python. To address this gap, we introduce EffiBench-X, the first multi-language benchmark designed to measure the efficiency of LLM-generated code. EffiBench-X supports Python, C++, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, and Golang. It comprises competitive programming tasks with human-expert solutions as efficiency baselines. Evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs on EffiBench-X reveals that while models generate functionally correct code, they consistently underperform human experts in efficiency. Even the most efficient LLM-generated solutions (Qwen3-32B) achieve only around 62\% of human efficiency on average, with significant language-specific variations. LLMs show better efficiency in Python, Ruby, and JavaScript than in Java, C++, and Golang. For instance, DeepSeek-R1's Python code is significantly more efficient than its Java code. These results highlight the critical need for research into LLM optimization techniques to improve code efficiency across diverse languages. The dataset and evaluation infrastructure are submitted and available at https://github.com/EffiBench/EffiBench-X.git and https://huggingface.co/datasets/EffiBench/effibench-x.

Code generation models have increasingly become integral to aiding software development, offering assistance in tasks such as code completion, debugging, and code translation. Although current research has thoroughly examined the correctness of code produced by code generation models, a vital aspect, i.e., the efficiency of the generated code, has often been neglected. This paper presents EffiBench, a benchmark with 1,000 efficiency-critical coding problems for assessing the efficiency of code generated by code generation models. EffiBench contains a diverse set of LeetCode coding problems. Each problem is paired with an executable human-written canonical solution. With EffiBench, we empirically examine the capability of 21 Large Language Models (13 open-sourced and 8 closed-sourced) in generating efficient code. The results demonstrate that GPT-4-turbo generates the most efficient code, significantly outperforming Palm-2-chat-bison, Claude-instant-1, Gemini-pro, GPT-4, and GPT-3.5. Nevertheless, its code efficiency is still worse than the efficiency of human-written canonical solutions. In particular, the average and worst execution time of GPT-4-turbo generated code is 1.69 and 45.49 times that of the canonical solutions.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven the need for more efficient serving strategies. In this context, efficiency refers to the proportion of requests that meet their Service Level Objectives (SLOs), particularly for Time To First Token (TTFT) and Time Between Tokens (TBT). However, existing systems often prioritize one metric at the cost of the other. We present Ascendra, an LLM serving system designed to meet both TTFT and TBT SLOs simultaneously. The core insight behind Ascendra is that a request's urgency evolves as it approaches its deadline. To leverage this, Ascendra partitions GPU resources into two types of instances: low-priority and high-priority. Low-priority instances maximize throughput by processing requests out of arrival order, but at the risk of request starvation. To address this, Ascendra employs a performance model to predict requests at risk of missing their SLOs and proactively offloads them to high-priority instances. High-priority instances are optimized for low-latency execution and handle urgent requests nearing their deadlines. This partitioned architecture enables Ascendra to effectively balance high throughput and low latency. Extensive evaluation shows that Ascendra improves system throughput by up to 1.7x compared to vLLM and Sarathi-Serve while meeting both TTFT and TBT SLOs.

Spreadsheets are widely used for business analysis, financial modeling, reporting, and decision-making. However, most existing spreadsheet benchmarks evaluate isolated operations such as single-formula generation or local cell edits, and therefore fail to capture end-to-end workflows in realistic business settings. We introduce SpreadsheetBench 2, a workflow-level benchmark for spreadsheet agents that covers three task categories: generation, debugging, and visualization. The benchmark is constructed from authentic business data, including financial reports and corporate filings, and is annotated and validated by domain experts. The benchmark contains 321 tasks; each instance averages 11.8 worksheets and requires 593.5 cell modifications, reflecting large multi-sheet workbooks with cross-sheet dependencies. We evaluate eight frontier large language models under a unified multi-turn agent scaffold, and additionally include several LLM-based spreadsheet products as complementary baselines. Results show that current systems remain far from reliable on real-world workflows: the best model achieves 34.89\% overall task accuracy, and debugging accuracy is as low as 12.00\%. Trajectory analysis and a failure taxonomy further indicate that insufficient spreadsheet inspection and incorrect target-cell selection are the dominant bottlenecks. Together, these findings position SpreadsheetBench 2 as a challenging testbed for advancing reliable spreadsheet automation. Project page: https://spreadsheetbench.github.io/

Automatic workflow generation is the process of automatically synthesizing sequences of LLM calls, tool invocations, and post-processing steps for complex end-to-end tasks. Most prior methods cast this task as an optimization problem with limited theoretical grounding. We propose to cast workflow generation as Bayesian inference over a posterior distribution on workflows, and introduce Bayesian Workflow Generation (BWG), a sampling framework that builds workflows step-by-step using parallel look-ahead rollouts for importance weighting and a sequential in-loop refiner for pool-wide improvements. We prove that, without the refiner, the weighted empirical distribution converges to the target posterior. We instantiate BWG as BayesFlow, a training-free algorithm for workflow construction. Across six benchmark datasets, BayesFlow improves accuracy by up to 9 percentage points over SOTA workflow generation baselines and by up to 65 percentage points over zero-shot prompting, establishing BWG as a principled upgrade to search-based workflow design. Code will be available on https://github.com/BoYuanVisionary/BayesFlow.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their reasoning and decision-making abilities when deployed as agents. Richer reasoning, however, often comes at the cost of longer chain of thought (CoT), hampering interaction efficiency in real-world scenarios. Nevertheless, there still lacks systematic definition of LLM agent efficiency, hindering targeted improvements. To this end, we introduce dual-efficiency, comprising (i) step-level efficiency, which minimizes tokens per step, and (ii) trajectory-level efficiency, which minimizes the number of steps to complete a task. Building on this definition, we propose DEPO, a dual-efficiency preference optimization method that jointly rewards succinct responses and fewer action steps. Experiments on WebShop and BabyAI show that DEPO cuts token usage by up to 60.9% and steps by up to 26.9%, while achieving up to a 29.3% improvement in performance. DEPO also generalizes to three out-of-domain math benchmarks and retains its efficiency gains when trained on only 25% of the data. Our project page is at https://opencausalab.github.io/DEPO.

Model efficiency is a critical aspect of developing and deploying machine learning models. Inference time and latency directly affect the user experience, and some applications have hard requirements. In addition to inference costs, model training also have direct financial and environmental impacts. Although there are numerous well-established metrics (cost indicators) for measuring model efficiency, researchers and practitioners often assume that these metrics are correlated with each other and report only few of them. In this paper, we thoroughly discuss common cost indicators, their advantages and disadvantages, and how they can contradict each other. We demonstrate how incomplete reporting of cost indicators can lead to partial conclusions and a blurred or incomplete picture of the practical considerations of different models. We further present suggestions to improve reporting of efficiency metrics.

Language-model agents are increasingly used as persistent coworkers that assist users across multiple working days. During such workflows, the surrounding environment may change independently of the agent: new emails arrive, calendar entries shift, knowledge-base records are updated, and evidence appears across images, scanned PDFs, audio, video, and spreadsheets. Existing benchmarks do not adequately evaluate this setting because they typically run within a single static episode and remain largely text-centric. We introduce , a benchmark for coworker agents built around multi-turn multi-day tasks, a stateful sandboxed service environment whose state evolves between turns, and rule-based verification. The current release contains 100 tasks across 13 professional scenarios, executed against five stateful sandboxed services (filesystem, email, calendar, knowledge base, spreadsheet) and scored by 1537 deterministic Python checkers over post-execution service state; no LLM-as-judge is invoked during scoring. We benchmark seven frontier agent systems. The strongest model reaches 75.8 weighted score, but the best strict Task Success is only 20.0\%, indicating that partial progress is common while complete end-to-end workflow completion remains rare. Turn-level analysis shows that performance drops after the first exogenous environment update, highlighting adaptation to changing state as a key open challenge. We release the benchmark, evaluation harness, and construction pipeline to support reproducible coworker-agent evaluation.

The development of general-purpose agents requires a shift from executing simple instructions to completing complex, real-world productivity workflows. However, current tool-use benchmarks remain misaligned with real-world requirements, relying on AI-generated queries, dummy tools, and limited system-level coordination. To address this, we propose GTA-2, a hierarchical benchmark for General Tool Agents (GTA) spanning atomic tool use and open-ended workflows. Built on real-world authenticity, it leverages real user queries, deployed tools, and multimodal contexts. (i) GTA-Atomic, inherited from our prior GTA benchmark, evaluates short-horizon, closed-ended tool-use precision. (ii) GTA-Workflow introduces long-horizon, open-ended tasks for realistic end-to-end completion. To evaluate open-ended deliverables, we propose a recursive checkpoint-based evaluation mechanism that decomposes objectives into verifiable sub-goals, enabling unified evaluation of both model capabilities and agent execution frameworks (i.e., execution harnesses). Experiments reveal a pronounced capability cliff: while frontier models already struggle on atomic tasks (below 50%), they largely fail on workflows, with top models achieving only 14.39% success. Further analysis shows that checkpoint-guided feedback improves performance, while advanced frameworks such as Manus and OpenClaw substantially enhance workflow completion, highlighting the importance of execution harness design beyond the underlying model capacity. These findings provide guidance for developing reliable personal and professional assistants. Dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/open-compass/GTA.

Recent years have seen the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for code generation. Different from existing work that evaluate the correctness of the code generated by LLMs, we propose to further evaluate its efficiency. More efficient code can lead to higher performance and execution efficiency of programs and software completed by LLM-assisted programming. First, we evaluate the efficiency of the code generated by LLMs on two benchmarks, HumanEval and MBPP. Then, we choose a set of programming problems from the online judge platform LeetCode to conduct a more difficult evaluation. Finally, we explore several prompts that would enable LLMs to generate more efficient code.

Enterprise systems are crucial for enhancing productivity and decision-making among employees and customers. Integrating LLM based systems into enterprise systems enables intelligent automation, personalized experiences, and efficient information retrieval, driving operational efficiency and strategic growth. However, developing and evaluating such systems is challenging due to the inherent complexity of enterprise environments, where data is fragmented across multiple sources and governed by sophisticated access controls. We present EnterpriseBench, a comprehensive benchmark that simulates enterprise settings, featuring 500 diverse tasks across software engineering, HR, finance, and administrative domains. Our benchmark uniquely captures key enterprise characteristics including data source fragmentation, access control hierarchies, and cross-functional workflows. Additionally, we provide a novel data generation pipeline that creates internally consistent enterprise tasks from organizational metadata. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLM agents demonstrate that even the most capable models achieve only 41.8% task completion, highlighting significant opportunities for improvement in enterprise-focused AI systems.

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.

While GUI agents have shown impressive capabilities in common computer-use tasks such as OSWorld, current benchmarks mainly focus on isolated and single-application tasks. This overlooks a critical real-world requirement of coordinating across multiple applications to accomplish complex profession-specific workflows. To bridge this gap, we present a computer-use benchmark in cross-application workflows, named WindowsWorld, designed to systematically assess GUI Agents on complex multi-step tasks that mirror real-world professional activities. Our methodology uses a multi-agent framework steered by 16 occupations to generate four difficulty-level tasks with intermediate inspection, which are then refined by human review and executed in a simulated environment. The resulting benchmark contains 181 tasks with an average of 5.0 sub-goals across 17 common desktop applications, of which 78% are inherently multi-application. Experimental results of leading large models and agents show that: 1) All computer-use agents perform poorly on multi-application tasks (< 21% success rate), far below the performance of simple single-app tasks; 2) They largely fail at tasks requiring conditional judgment and reasoning across geq 3 applications, stalling at early sub-goals; 3) Low execution efficiency, where tasks often fail despite far exceeding human step limits. Code, benchmark data, and evaluation resources are available at github.com/HITsz-TMG/WindowsWorld.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly pushed the frontiers of program synthesis. Advancement of LLM-based program synthesis calls for a thorough evaluation of LLM-generated code. Most evaluation frameworks focus on the (functional) correctness of generated code; efficiency, as an important measure of code quality, has been overlooked in existing evaluations. In this work, we develop ENAMEL (EfficeNcy AutoMatic EvaLuator), a rigorous and high-standard benchmark for evaluating the capability of LLMs in generating efficient code. Firstly, we propose a new efficiency metric called eff@k, which generalizes the pass@k metric from correctness to efficiency and appropriately handles right-censored execution time. Furthermore, we derive an unbiased and variance-reduced estimator of eff@k via Rao--Blackwellization; we also provide a numerically stable implementation for the new estimator. Secondly, to set a high-standard for efficiency evaluation, we employ a human expert to design best algorithms and implementations as our reference solutions of efficiency, many of which are much more efficient than existing canonical solutions in HumanEval and HumanEval+. Moreover, to ensure a rigorous evaluation, we employ a human expert to curate strong test case generators to filter out wrong code and differentiate suboptimal algorithms. An extensive study across 30 popular LLMs using our benchmark ENAMEL shows that LLMs still fall short of generating expert-level efficient code. Using two subsets of our problem set, we demonstrate that such deficiency is because current LLMs struggle in designing advanced algorithms and are barely aware of implementation optimization. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/q-rz/enamel .

The automated generation of agentic workflows is a promising frontier for enabling large language models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks. However, our investigation reveals that the robustness of agentic workflow remains a critical, unaddressed challenge. Current methods often generate wildly inconsistent workflows when provided with instructions that are semantically identical but differently phrased. This brittleness severely undermines their reliability and trustworthiness for real-world applications. To quantitatively diagnose this instability, we propose metrics based on nodal and topological similarity to evaluate workflow consistency against common semantic variations such as paraphrasing and noise injection. Subsequently, we further propose a novel training framework, RobustFlow, that leverages preference optimization to teach models invariance to instruction variations. By training on sets of synonymous task descriptions, RobustFlow boosts workflow robustness scores to 70\% - 90\%, which is a substantial improvement over existing approaches. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/DEFENSE-SEU/RobustFlow.

The remarkable performance of models like the OpenAI o1 can be attributed to their ability to emulate human-like long-time thinking during inference. These models employ extended chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, exploring multiple strategies to enhance problem-solving capabilities. However, a critical question remains: How to intelligently and efficiently scale computational resources during testing. This paper presents the first comprehensive study on the prevalent issue of overthinking in these models, where excessive computational resources are allocated for simple problems with minimal benefit. We introduce novel efficiency metrics from both outcome and process perspectives to evaluate the rational use of computational resources by o1-like models. Using a self-training paradigm, we propose strategies to mitigate overthinking, streamlining reasoning processes without compromising accuracy. Experimental results show that our approach successfully reduces computational overhead while preserving model performance across a range of testsets with varying difficulty levels, such as GSM8K, MATH500, GPQA, and AIME.

The procure to pay process (P2P) in large enterprises is a back-end business process which deals with the procurement of products and services for enterprise operations. Procurement is done by issuing purchase orders to impaneled vendors and invoices submitted by vendors are paid after they go through a rigorous validation process. Agents orchestrating P2P process often encounter the problem of matching a product or service descriptions in the invoice to those in purchase order and verify if the ordered items are what have been supplied or serviced. For example, the description in the invoice and purchase order could be TRES 739mL CD KER Smooth and TRES 0.739L CD KER Smth which look different at word level but refer to the same item. In a typical P2P process, agents are asked to manually select the products which are similar before invoices are posted for payment. This step in the business process is manual, repetitive, cumbersome, and costly. Since descriptions are not well-formed sentences, we cannot apply existing semantic and syntactic text similarity approaches directly. In this paper, we present two approaches to solve the above problem using various types of available agent's recorded feedback data. If the agent's feedback is in the form of a relative ranking between descriptions, we use similarity ranking algorithm. If the agent's feedback is absolute such as match or no-match, we use classification similarity algorithm. We also present the threats to the validity of our approach and present a possible remedy making use of product taxonomy and catalog. We showcase the comparative effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches over many benchmarks and real-world data sets.

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

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.

Efficiency is a key property to foster inclusiveness and reduce environmental costs, especially in an era of LLMs. In this work, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of efficiency for MT evaluation metrics. Our approach involves replacing computation-intensive transformers with lighter alternatives and employing linear and quadratic approximations for alignment algorithms on top of LLM representations. We evaluate six (reference-free and reference-based) metrics across three MT datasets and examine 16 lightweight transformers. In addition, we look into the training efficiency of metrics like COMET by utilizing adapters. Our results indicate that (a) TinyBERT provides the optimal balance between quality and efficiency, (b) CPU speed-ups are more substantial than those on GPU; (c) WMD approximations yield no efficiency gains while reducing quality and (d) adapters enhance training efficiency (regarding backward pass speed and memory requirements) as well as, in some cases, metric quality. These findings can help to strike a balance between evaluation speed and quality, which is essential for effective NLG systems. Furthermore, our research contributes to the ongoing efforts to optimize NLG evaluation metrics with minimal impact on performance. To our knowledge, ours is the most comprehensive analysis of different aspects of efficiency for MT metrics conducted so far.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential and impressive performance in automating the generation and optimization of workflows. However, existing approaches are marked by limited reasoning capabilities, high computational demands, and significant resource requirements. To address these issues, we propose DebFlow, a framework that employs a debate mechanism to optimize workflows and integrates reflexion to improve based on previous experiences. We evaluated our method across six benchmark datasets, including HotpotQA, MATH, and ALFWorld. Our approach achieved a 3\% average performance improvement over the latest baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in diverse problem domains. In particular, during training, our framework reduces resource consumption by 37\% compared to the state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, we performed ablation studies. Removing the Debate component resulted in a 4\% performance drop across two benchmark datasets, significantly greater than the 2\% drop observed when the Reflection component was removed. These findings strongly demonstrate the critical role of Debate in enhancing framework performance, while also highlighting the auxiliary contribution of reflexion to overall optimization.

Structured LLM workflows, where specialized LLM sub-agents execute according to a predefined graph, have become a powerful abstraction for solving complex tasks. Optimizing such workflows, i.e., selecting configurations for each sub-agent to balance accuracy and latency, is challenging due to the combinatorial design space over model choices, reasoning budgets, and workflow structures. Existing cost-aware methods largely treat workflow optimization as a routing problem, selecting a configuration at inference time for each query according to the accuracy-latency objective used during training. We argue that structured LLM workflows can also be optimized from a compilation perspective: before deployment, the system can globally explore the workflow design space and construct a reusable set of workflow-level configurations spanning diverse accuracy-latency trade-offs. Drawing inspiration from machine learning compilers, we introduce FlowCompile, a structured LLM workflow compiler that performs compile-time design space exploration to identify a high-quality, reusable trade-off set. FlowCompile decomposes a workflow into sub-agents, profiles each sub-agent under diverse configurations, and composes these measurements through a structure-aware proxy to estimate workflow-level accuracy and latency. It then identifies diverse high-quality configurations in a single compile-time pass, without retraining or online adaptation. Experiments across diverse workflows and challenging benchmarks show that FlowCompile consistently outperforms heuristically optimized workflow configurations and routing-based baselines, delivering up to 6.4x speedup. The compiled configuration set further serves as a reusable optimization artifact, enabling flexible deployment under varying runtime preferences and supporting downstream selection or routing.

While current Computer Use Agent (CUA) benchmarks measure task completion effectively, they provide limited assessment of enterprise deployment readiness, emphasizing functional correctness over the operational reliability required for production systems. We present UI-CUBE (UiPath Computer Use BEnchmark), a systematic benchmark comprising 226 tasks across two difficulty tiers designed to expose fundamental architectural limitations in current CUAs. Our evaluation covers simple UI interactions (136 tasks) and complex workflows including copy-paste tasks (50 tasks) and enterprise application scenarios (40 tasks), with systematic interface variation coverage, multi-resolution testing and automated validation of task success through the application state. Evaluation of five state-of-the-art models reveals a sharp capability cliff rather than gradual performance degradation. Simple UI interactions achieve 67-85% success rates (compared to 97.9% human performance), but complex workflows drop precipitously to 9-19%. Human evaluators with no prior application experience achieve only 61.2% on complex tasks despite near-perfect performance on simple tasks, establishing realistic performance ceilings. This discontinuous performance pattern -- where agents achieve 68-87% of human performance on simple tasks but only 15-32% on complex workflows -- indicates fundamental architectural limitations in memory management, hierarchical planning, and state coordination rather than incremental capability gaps addressable through better training or prompting. UI-CUBE functions as an enterprise-readiness diagnostic, revealing that while current CUAs can manipulate individual interface elements, they cannot yet function as reliable workflow automation tools. These findings provide architectural insights essential for developing production-ready CUAs capable of managing complex, multi-step enterprise processes.

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long-horizon, economically valuable, real-world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 subfields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is 2.6%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP-relevant impact.

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.

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.

Tool-augmented large language models have advanced from single-turn question answering to deep research workflows that iteratively plan queries, invoke external tools, and synthesize information to address complex information needs. Evaluating such workflows presents a fundamental challenge: reliance on live APIs introduces non-determinism, as tool invocations may yield different results across runs due to temporal drift, rate limiting, and evolving backend states. This variance undermines reproducibility and invalidates cross-system comparisons. We present ScholarGym, a simulation environment for reproducible evaluation of deep research workflows on academic literature. The environment decouples workflow components into query planning, tool invocation, and relevance assessment, enabling fine-grained analysis of each stage under controlled conditions. Built on a static corpus of 570K papers with deterministic retrieval, ScholarGym provides 2,536 queries with expert-annotated ground truth. Experiments across diverse backbone models reveal how reasoning capabilities, planning strategies, and selection mechanisms interact over iterative refinement.

This paper presents BPMN Assistant, a tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for natural language-based creation and editing of BPMN diagrams. A specialized JSON-based representation is introduced as a structured alternative to the direct handling of XML to enhance the accuracy of process modifications. Process generation quality is evaluated using Graph Edit Distance (GED) and Relative Graph Edit Distance (RGED), while editing performance is evaluated with a binary success metric. Results show that JSON and XML achieve similar similarity scores in generation, but JSON offers greater reliability, faster processing, and significantly higher editing success rates. We discuss key trade-offs, limitations, and future improvements. The implementation is available at https://github.com/jtlicardo/bpmn-assistant.

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.

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.

We present Auto-BenchmarkCard, a workflow for generating validated descriptions of AI benchmarks. Benchmark documentation is often incomplete or inconsistent, making it difficult to interpret and compare benchmarks across tasks or domains. Auto-BenchmarkCard addresses this gap by combining multi-agent data extraction from heterogeneous sources (e.g., Hugging Face, Unitxt, academic papers) with LLM-driven synthesis. A validation phase evaluates factual accuracy through atomic entailment scoring using the FactReasoner tool. This workflow has the potential to promote transparency, comparability, and reusability in AI benchmark reporting, enabling researchers and practitioners to better navigate and evaluate benchmark choices.

Code generation has largely improved development efficiency in the era of large language models (LLMs). With the ability to follow instructions, current LLMs can be prompted to generate code solutions given detailed descriptions in natural language. Many research efforts are being devoted to improving the correctness of LLM-generated code, and many benchmarks are proposed to evaluate the correctness comprehensively. Despite the focus on correctness, the time efficiency of LLM-generated code solutions is under-explored. Current correctness benchmarks are not suitable for time efficiency evaluation since their test cases cannot well distinguish the time efficiency of different code solutions. Besides, the current execution time measurement is not stable and comprehensive, threatening the validity of the time efficiency evaluation. To address the challenges in the time efficiency evaluation of code generation, we propose COFFE, a code generation benchmark for evaluating the time efficiency of LLM-generated code solutions. COFFE contains 398 and 358 problems for function-level and file-level code generation, respectively. To improve the distinguishability, we design a novel stressful test case generation approach with contracts and two new formats of test cases to improve the accuracy of generation. For the time evaluation metric, we propose efficienct@k based on CPU instruction count to ensure a stable and solid comparison between different solutions. We evaluate 14 popular LLMs on COFFE and identify four findings. Based on the findings, we draw some implications for LLM researchers and software practitioners to facilitate future research and usage of LLMs in code generation.

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a driving force in transforming various domains, reshaping the artificial general intelligence landscape. However, the increasing computational and memory demands of these models present substantial challenges, hindering both academic research and practical applications. To address these issues, a wide array of methods, including both algorithmic and hardware solutions, have been developed to enhance the efficiency of LLMs. This survey delivers a comprehensive review of algorithmic advancements aimed at improving LLM efficiency. Unlike other surveys that typically focus on specific areas such as training or model compression, this paper examines the multi-faceted dimensions of efficiency essential for the end-to-end algorithmic development of LLMs. Specifically, it covers various topics related to efficiency, including scaling laws, data utilization, architectural innovations, training and tuning strategies, and inference techniques. This paper aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners, laying the groundwork for future innovations in this critical research area. Our repository of relevant references is maintained at url{https://github.com/tding1/Efficient-LLM-Survey}.

Agentic workflows have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving complex, multi-stage tasks, but serving them at scale is computationally expensive given the many LLM inferences that each request must pass through. Configuration selection, or the cost-aware assignment of workflow agents to specific LLMs, can reduce these costs, but existing approaches bind configuration decisions before request execution, making them ill-suited for the heterogeneous and lengthy execution of workflows. Specifically, system loads can fluctuate rapidly and substantially during a request's lifetime, causing fixed configurations to quickly become suboptimal. We present Aragog, a system that progressively adapts a request's configuration throughout its execution to match runtime dynamics. To make this practical despite the massive space of workflow configurations, Aragog decouples the problem into two core elements -- a one-time routing step that identifies all accuracy-preserving configurations, and a cheap per-stage scheduler that selects among them using up-to-date system observations -- and introduces novel strategies to accelerate each. Across diverse workflows and model families, Aragog increases maximum serving throughput by 50.0--217.0\% and reduces median latency by 32.5--78.9\% at peak request rates, while maintaining accuracy comparable to the most expensive configurations.

Scientific research follows multi-turn, multi-step workflows that require proactively searching the literature, consulting figures and tables, and integrating evidence across papers to align experimental settings and support reproducible conclusions. This joint capability is not systematically assessed in existing benchmarks, which largely under-evaluate proactive search, multi-evidence integration and sustained evidence use over time. In this work, we introduce EpiBench, an episodic multi-turn multimodal benchmark that instantiates short research workflows. Given a research task, agents must navigate across papers over multiple turns, align evidence from figures and tables, and use the accumulated evidence in the memory to answer objective questions that require cross paper comparisons and multi-figure integration. EpiBench introduces a process-level evaluation framework for fine-grained testing and diagnosis of research agents. Our experiments show that even the leading model achieves an accuracy of only 29.23% on the hard split, indicating substantial room for improvement in multi-turn, multi-evidence research workflows, providing an evaluation platform for verifiable and reproducible research agents.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have shown strong capabilities in using external tools to solve complex tasks. However, existing evaluations often overlook the temporal dimension of tool use, especially the impact of tool response latency, and are usually limited to single-task settings. In real-world applications, multiple tasks often need to be executed concurrently, and overall efficiency depends on whether an agent can use idle time while waiting for tool responses. We refer to this capability as asynchronous tool calling. To evaluate it, we propose AsyncTool, a benchmark for assessing LLM-based agents in interactive multi-task tool-use environments with delayed tool feedback. AsyncTool presents multiple heterogeneous tasks simultaneously and simulates realistic tool response latency during execution. Using a hybrid data evolution strategy, we construct a diverse asynchronous multitasking dataset that covers multiple scenarios and tool-use patterns. We evaluate models at the step, sub-task, and task levels, and introduce efficiency-oriented metrics to measure task coordination and completion efficiency. Extensive experiments show that delayed tool feedback poses substantial challenges to current agents and leads to clear performance degradation. Models that better coordinate task switching, dependency tracking, and state maintenance achieve stronger performance on AsyncTool. Our analysis identifies key failure modes of current tool-using agents and provides practical insights for designing future systems with stronger temporal reasoning and coordination capabilities.

Existing computer-use benchmarks fail to capture the realism, complexity, and long-horizon demands of real-world computer use, limiting their ability to reveal the limitations of frontier agents. We introduce OSWorld 2.0, a benchmark of 108 long-horizon computer-use workflows across everyday and professional tasks, designed to capture complex and challenging real-world phenomena. Each task represents a realistic end-to-end workflow that takes human users a median of about 1.6 hours to complete and requires an average of 318 tool calls with Claude Opus 4.7 using maximum thinking, compared with about 30 in OSWorld 1.0. OSWorld 2.0 targets challenge phenomena that are common in real workflows yet underrepresented in prior benchmarks, spanning interaction-design challenges such as streaming interaction and dynamic environments, as well as agent-pattern challenges such as cross-source reasoning, implicit-state inference, and visual-spatial precision. Tasks are grounded in authentic input artifacts and cross-referenced against realistic stateful user profile data, and include separate safety reports auditing safety-sensitive execution. Under our primary binary-completion metric at 500 steps, Claude Opus 4.8 with maximum thinking and batched tool calls scores best but still completes only 20.6% of tasks at a 54.8% partial score; GPT-5.5 is far more token-efficient yet plateaus near 13%. These results show that current agents are still far from professional-level computer use: rather than stumbling on basic GUI control or coding, they lose track of constraints, miss information that arrives mid-task, guess rather than ask the user, and skip verification, struggling most when a task hinges on hidden state they must recover.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed to automate productivity tasks (e.g., email, scheduling, document management), but evaluating them on live services is risky due to potentially irreversible changes. Existing benchmarks rely on simplified environments and fail to capture realistic, stateful, multi-service workflows. We introduce ClawsBench, a benchmark for evaluating and improving LLM agents in realistic productivity settings. It includes five high-fidelity mock services (Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Drive) with full state management and deterministic snapshot/restore, along with 44 structured tasks covering single-service, cross-service, and safety-critical scenarios. We decompose agent scaffolding into two independent levers (domain skills that inject API knowledge via progressive disclosure, and a meta prompt that coordinates behavior across services) and vary both to measure their separate and combined effects. Experiments across 6 models, 4 agent harnesses, and 33 conditions show that with full scaffolding, agents achieve task success rates of 39-64% but exhibit unsafe action rates of 7-33%. On OpenClaw, the top five models fall within a 10 percentage-point band on task success (53-63%), with unsafe action rates from 7% to 23% and no consistent ordering between the two metrics. We identify eight recurring patterns of unsafe behavior, including multi-step sandbox escalation and silent contract modification.

Business process automation (BPA) that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to convert natural language (NL) instructions into structured business process artifacts is becoming a hot research topic. This paper makes two technical contributions -- (i) FLOW-BENCH, a high quality dataset of paired natural language instructions and structured business process definitions to evaluate NL-based BPA tools, and support bourgeoning research in this area, and (ii) FLOW-GEN, our approach to utilize LLMs to translate natural language into an intermediate representation with Python syntax that facilitates final conversion into widely adopted business process definition languages, such as BPMN and DMN. We bootstrap FLOW-BENCH by demonstrating how it can be used to evaluate the components of FLOW-GEN across eight LLMs of varying sizes. We hope that FLOW-GEN and FLOW-BENCH catalyze further research in BPA making it more accessible to novice and expert users.

Interactive agent benchmarks face a tension between scalable construction and realistic workflow evaluation. Hand-authored tasks are expensive to extend and revise, while static prompt evaluation misses failures that only appear when agents operate over persistent state. Existing interactive benchmarks have advanced agent evaluation significantly, but most initialize tasks from clean state and do not systematically test how agents handle pre-existing partial, stale, or conflicting artifacts. We present ClawForge, a generator-backed benchmark framework for executable command-line workflows under state conflict. The framework compiles scenario templates, grounded slots, initialized state, reference trajectories, and validators into reproducible task specifications, and evaluates agents step by step over persistent workflow surfaces using normalized end state and observable side effects rather than exact trajectory matching. We instantiate this framework as the ClawForge-Bench (17 scenarios, 6 ability categories). Results across seven frontier models show that the best model reaches only 45.3% strict accuracy, wrong-state replacement remains below 17\% for all models, and the widest model separation (17% to 90%) is driven by whether agents inspect existing state before acting. Partial-credit and step-efficiency analyses further reveal that many failures are near-miss closures rather than early breakdowns, and that models exhibit qualitatively different failure styles under state conflict.

We introduce the Series-Parallel Workflow Decomposition (SP\-WD) heuristic algorithm for the Workflow Scheduling Problem (WSP) decomposition. We demonstrate that the SPWD algorithm facilitates the scheduling of large WSP instances with the hybrid D-Wave Constrained Quadratic Model solver, enabling the scheduling of instances that would otherwise exceed its capacity limitations. We also describe the accompanying execution environment used to obtain the results of the experiments with real-life workflow instances available in the WfCommons standardization initiative repository.

Information systems generate a large volume of event log data during business operations, much of which consists of low-value and redundant information. When performance predictions are made directly from these logs, the accuracy of the predictions can be compromised. Researchers have explored methods to simplify and compress these data while preserving their valuable components. Most existing approaches focus on reducing the dimensionality of the data by eliminating redundant and irrelevant features. However, there has been limited investigation into the efficiency of execution both before and after event log simplification. In this paper, we present a prediction point selection algorithm designed to avoid the simplification of all points that function similarly. We select sequences or self-loop structures to form a simplifiable segment, and we optimize the deviation between the actual simplifiable value and the original data prediction value to prevent over-simplification. Experiments indicate that the simplified event log retains its predictive performance and, in some cases, enhances its predictive accuracy compared to the original event log.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used to assist with operations research (OR) modeling, yet existing OR-oriented benchmarks often reduce evaluation to one-shot translation from a self-contained problem statement into a mathematical formulation or solver program. Such settings abstract away two characteristics of real industrial OR workflows: persistent multi-artifact workspaces and multi-stage task lifecycles. We introduce OR-Space, a full-lifecycle workspace benchmark for evaluating industrial optimization agents across model construction, model revision, and grounded explanation. Each instance is an executable workspace containing business documents, structured data, optional code artifacts, solver outputs, and task-specific evaluators distributed across interdependent files. OR-Space defines three task modes: Build, where agents construct solver-ready optimization models from heterogeneous artifacts; Revise, where agents modify existing models under changing requirements or solver feedback while preserving valid prior logic; and Explain, where agents answer grounded questions about solutions, constraints, and business implications using evidence spread across workspace artifacts. By combining persistent workspaces with lifecycle-oriented tasks, OR-Space evaluates whether agents can perform reliable optimization work beyond end-to-end text generation. We describe the benchmark design, evaluation protocol, and quality-control pipeline, and position OR-Space as a benchmark for studying the reliability, failure modes, and practical readiness of LLM agents in industrial OR workflows.

Mathematical reasoning remains a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to hallucinations. When combined with formal proof assistants like Lean, these hallucinations can be eliminated through rigorous verification, making theorem proving reliable. However, even with formal verification, LLMs still struggle with long proofs and complex mathematical formalizations. While Lean with LLMs offers valuable assistance with retrieving lemmas, generating tactics, or even complete proofs, it lacks a crucial capability: providing a sense of proof progress. This limitation particularly impacts the overall development efficiency in large formalization projects. We introduce LeanProgress, a method that predicts the progress in the proof. Training and evaluating our models made on a large corpus of Lean proofs from Lean Workbook Plus and Mathlib4 and how many steps remain to complete it, we employ data preprocessing and balancing techniques to handle the skewed distribution of proof lengths. Our experiments show that LeanProgress achieves an overall prediction accuracy of 75.1\% in predicting the amount of progress and, hence, the remaining number of steps. When integrated into a best-first search framework using Reprover, our method shows a 3.8\% improvement on Mathlib4 compared to baseline performances of 41.2\%, particularly for longer proofs. These results demonstrate how proof progress prediction can enhance both automated and interactive theorem proving, enabling users to make more informed decisions about proof strategies.

Analyzing Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) from large volumes of data is critical for drafting and publishing comprehensive CTI reports. This process usually follows a three-stage workflow -- triage, deep search and TI drafting. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising route toward automation, existing benchmarks still have limitations. These benchmarks often consist of tasks that do not reflect real-world analyst workflows. For example, human analysts rarely receive tasks in the form of multiple-choice questions. Also, existing benchmarks often rely on model-centric metrics that emphasize lexical overlap rather than actionable, detailed insights essential for security analysts. Moreover, they typically fail to cover the complete three-stage workflow. To address these issues, we introduce CyberThreat-Eval, which is collected from the daily CTI workflow of a world-leading company. This expert-annotated benchmark assesses LLMs on practical tasks across all three stages as mentioned above. It utilizes analyst-centric metrics that measure factual accuracy, content quality, and operational costs. Our evaluation using this benchmark reveals important insights into the limitations of current LLMs. For example, LLMs often lack the nuanced expertise required to handle complex details and struggle to distinguish between correct and incorrect information. To address these challenges, the CTI workflow incorporates both external ground-truth databases and human expert knowledge. TRA allows human experts to iteratively provide feedback for continuous improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/xschen-beb/CyberThreat-Eval{GitHub} and https://huggingface.co/datasets/xse/CyberThreat-Eval{HuggingFace}.

Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation in data science offers substantial potential for enhancing tasks such as data manipulation, statistical analysis, and visualization. However, the effectiveness of these models in the data science domain remains underexplored. This paper presents a controlled experiment that empirically assesses the performance of four leading LLM-based AI assistants-Microsoft Copilot (GPT-4 Turbo), ChatGPT (o1-preview), Claude (3.5 Sonnet), and Perplexity Labs (Llama-3.1-70b-instruct)-on a diverse set of data science coding challenges sourced from the Stratacratch platform. Using the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach, we evaluated each model's effectiveness across task types (Analytical, Algorithm, Visualization) and varying difficulty levels. Our findings reveal that all models exceeded a 50% baseline success rate, confirming their capability beyond random chance. Notably, only ChatGPT and Claude achieved success rates significantly above a 60% baseline, though none of the models reached a 70% threshold, indicating limitations in higher standards. ChatGPT demonstrated consistent performance across varying difficulty levels, while Claude's success rate fluctuated with task complexity. Hypothesis testing indicates that task type does not significantly impact success rate overall. For analytical tasks, efficiency analysis shows no significant differences in execution times, though ChatGPT tended to be slower and less predictable despite high success rates. This study provides a structured, empirical evaluation of LLMs in data science, delivering insights that support informed model selection tailored to specific task demands. Our findings establish a framework for future AI assessments, emphasizing the value of rigorous evaluation beyond basic accuracy measures.

Business Process Management (BPM) aims to improve organizational activities and their outcomes by managing the underlying processes. To achieve this, it is often necessary to consider information from various sources, including unstructured textual documents. Therefore, researchers have developed several BPM-specific solutions that extract information from textual documents using Natural Language Processing techniques. These solutions are specific to their respective tasks and cannot accomplish multiple process-related problems as a general-purpose instrument. However, in light of the recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with remarkable reasoning capabilities, such a general-purpose instrument with multiple applications now appears attainable. In this paper, we illustrate how LLMs can accomplish text-related BPM tasks by applying a specific LLM to three exemplary tasks: mining imperative process models from textual descriptions, mining declarative process models from textual descriptions, and assessing the suitability of process tasks from textual descriptions for robotic process automation. We show that, without extensive configuration or prompt engineering, LLMs perform comparably to or better than existing solutions and discuss implications for future BPM research as well as practical usage.

We introduce the AI Productivity Index for Software Engineering (APEX-SWE), a benchmark for assessing whether frontier AI models can execute economically valuable software engineering work. Unlike existing evaluations that focus on narrow, well-defined tasks, APEX-SWE assesses two novel task types that reflect real-world software engineering: (1) Integration tasks (n=100), which require constructing end-to-end systems across heterogeneous cloud primitives, business applications, and infrastructure-as-code services, and (2) Observability tasks (n=100), which require debugging production failures using telemetry signals such as logs and dashboards, as well as unstructured context. We evaluated eleven frontier models for the APEX-SWE leaderboard. Claude Opus 4.6 leads the APEX-SWE leaderboard with 40.5% Pass@1, followed by Claude Opus 4.5 at 38.7%. Our analysis shows that strong performance is primarily driven by epistemic discipline, defined as the capacity to distinguish between assumptions and verified facts. It is often combined with systematic verification prior to acting. We open-source the APEX-SWE evaluation harness and a dev set (n=50).

LLM-based agents struggle to execute complex, multi-step Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that are fundamental to industrial automation. Existing benchmarks fail to capture the procedural complexity and tool orchestration demands of real-world workflows. We introduce SOP-Bench, a benchmark of 2,000+ tasks from human expert-authored SOPs across 12 business domains (healthcare, logistics, finance, content moderation, etc.). Using a human-AI collaborative framework, experts crafted authentic SOPs while AI generated artifacts (tools, APIs, datasets), all human-validated, yielding realistic tasks with executable interfaces and ground-truth outputs. SOP-Bench serves as a research enabler for systematically investigating agent architectures, model capabilities, and deployment considerations across diverse procedural tasks. We demonstrate its utility through illustrative experiments with a subset of frontier models across Function-Calling (FC) and ReAct agents, revealing critical insights. For example, (1) newer models do not guarantee better performance - Claude 4 family outperforms Claude 4.5 family on ReAct tasks (Claude 4 Opus: 72.4% vs. Claude 4.5 Sonnet: 63.3% task success rate), demonstrating that production upgrades require validation; (2) no single model-agent combination dominates: best performances range from 57% to 100% depending on domain. These examples illustrate how SOP-Bench enables isolating and studying specific dimensions of agent performance without costly production experiments. Our goal is not to rank model capabilities or build optimal agents, but to provide a rigorous evaluation framework that enables the researchers and practitioners to systematically investigate agent design choices, model selection, and deployment strategies. We release the benchmark at https://github.com/amazon-science/sop-bench.