用可复用的结构先验替代逐任务搜索,大幅降低工作流设计成本。
Why Search When You Can Transfer? Amortized Agentic Workflow Design from Structural Priors

- 从多个任务中提炼出工作流的组合规律与接口契约,形成可迁移的结构先验。
- 在五个基准上超越现有方法,单任务优化成本降低99.9%。
- 支持跨模型迁移,即使替换算子名称仍保持93%以上性能。
自动化智能体工作流设计依赖于每任务独立的迭代搜索,计算开销大且无法复用跨任务的结构知识。我们观察到优化后的工作流趋于少数特定领域的拓扑结构,表明该组合搜索过程高度冗余。基于此,提出SWIFT(通过少样本迁移合成工作流)框架,将工作流设计转化为可复用的结构先验。SWIFT首先通过对比分析多个源任务的搜索轨迹,提取出组合启发式规则和输出接口契约;推理时,仅需一次LLM生成,结合这些先验与跨任务工作流示范,即可为未见目标任务直接生成完整可执行的工作流,完全跳过迭代搜索。在五个基准上,SWIFT优于当前最优搜索方法,且单任务边际优化成本降低三个数量级。进一步在四个未见基准上验证泛化能力,并成功从GPT-4o-mini迁移到Grok、Qwen、Gemma三类基础模型。受控消融实验表明,工作流示范主要传递拓扑结构而非表面语义:将所有算子名称替换为随机字符串后,系统平均性能仍保留93%以上。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Automated agentic workflow design currently relies on per-task iterative search, which is computationally prohibitive and fails to reuse structural knowledge across tasks. We observe that optimized workflows converge to a small family of domain-specific topologies, suggesting that this combinatorial search is largely redundant. Building on this insight, we propose SWIFT (Synthesizing Workflows via Few-shot Transfer), a framework that amortizes workflow design into reusable structural priors. SWIFT first distills compositional heuristics and output-interface contracts from contrastive analysis of prior search trajectories across source tasks. At inference time, it conditions a single LLM generation pass on these priors together with cross-task workflow demonstrations to synthesize a complete, executable workflow for an unseen target task, bypassing iterative search entirely. On five benchmarks, SWIFT outperforms the state-of-the-art search-based method while reducing marginal per-task optimization cost by three orders of magnitude. It further generalizes to four additional unseen benchmarks and transfers successfully from GPT-4o-mini to three additional foundation models (Grok, Qwen, Gemma). Controlled ablations reveal that workflow demonstrations primarily transfer topological structure rather than surface semantics: replacing all operator names with random strings still retains over 93% of the full system's average performance.
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