提出可复用前缀的搜索算法,显著降低大模型工作流优化的计算成本。
Agent-UCT: Upper Confidence Bounds Applied to Trees for Agentic Workflow Optimization with Cost-Awareness
- 基于树搜索改进UCT算法,利用前缀复用来减少重复计算。
- 在HotpotQA上实现73.6%的搜索成本降低,速度提升4.2倍。
- 适合需要高效优化复杂AI工作流的研究者与工程师。
优化代理工作流(如RAG流水线)需在有限评估预算下探索离散组件组合的庞大空间。现有方法——启发式搜索、黑盒优化和标准树搜索——未显式利用工作流的组合结构,导致冗余计算和预算分配低效。我们提出Agent-UCT(基于代理的成本感知上限置信度树算法),在UCT基础上引入由二分前缀复用图导出的复用感知正则项,使搜索偏向复用已执行的配置前缀,减少冗余执行同时保持有效探索。我们的框架RAGSpace将LongRAG、LightRAG和Self-RAG的异构组件统一为五维配置空间,支持跨框架重组。WTB(工作流测试基准)提供确定性重放、内容寻址缓存和事务一致性,确保中间状态仅生成一次并全局复用。在HotpotQA和UltraDomain上的实验表明,Agent-UCT在固定框架预设中找到了最优泛化性能配置。全池评估下,二分前缀复用使逻辑搜索成本相比无前缀共享的上限降低73.6%;相较全池评估,采样评估进一步实现4.2倍的实时时钟加速。Agent-UCT、RAGSpace与WTB共同构成一个成本敏感、可复现、组合高效的代理工作流优化统一框架。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Optimizing agentic workflows, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, requires navigating a combinatorial space of discrete component choices under tight evaluation budgets. Existing approaches - heuristic search, black-box optimization, and standard tree search methods - do not explicitly exploit the compositional structure of these workflows, leading to redundant computation and inefficient budget allocation. We introduce Agent-UCT (Agent-based Cost-Aware Upper Confidence Bounds Applied to Trees), a tree search algorithm that extends UCT with a reuse-aware regularization term derived from a bipartite prefix reuse graph. Agent-UCT biases selection toward branches that leverage previously materialized configuration prefixes, reducing redundant execution while maintaining effective exploration. Our framework, RAGSpace, unifies heterogeneous RAG components from LongRAG, LightRAG, and Self-RAG into a five-dimensional configuration space, enabling systematic cross-framework recombination. WTB (Workflow Test Bench) provides deterministic replay, content-addressable caching, and transactional consistency, ensuring that intermediate states are materialized once and reused across the search. Experiments on HotpotQA and UltraDomain demonstrate that Agent-UCT identifies configurations with the highest out-of-sample performance among the evaluated fixed framework presets. Under full-pool evaluation, bipartite prefix reuse reduces logical search cost by 73.6% relative to the no-prefix-sharing cost upper bound. Compared with full-pool evaluation, sampling-based evaluation further achieves a 4.2x wall-clock speedup. Agent-UCT, RAGSpace, and WTB together provide a unified framework for cost-aware, reproducible, and compositionally efficient agentic workflow optimization.
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