arXiv AI

Agent-UCT: Upper Confidence Bounds Applied to Trees for Cost-Aware Agentic Workflow Optimization

arXiv AI
Jul 28

Agent-UCT: Upper Confidence Bounds Applied to Trees for Agentic Workflow Optimization with Cost-Awareness

arXiv:2607. 24162v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimizing agentic workflows, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, requires navigating a combinatorial space of discrete component choices under tight evaluation budgets.

By Yang Li, Hai Liu, Dian Shao, Yu Wang, Xiyu Chen, Sergey Volkov, Bozhi Wang, Ziyu Sun, Sihang Liu, Ye Luo, Xiaowei Zhang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 27

Agent-UCT: Upper Confidence Bounds Applied to Trees for Agentic Workflow Optimization with Cost-Awareness

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.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Canopy: Exploiting Piecewise Smooth Tree Priors for Multi-Fidelity Bandits

CANOPY is a multi‑fidelity tree bandit algorithm that learns where a piecewise‑smooth prior holds instead of assuming global smoothness. It uses cheap random‑path probes to certify local aggregation bias and then focuses expensive leaf evaluations on cells where smoothness is violated. The method achieves provable fixed‑budget and regret guarantees that scale with the number of discontinuities, matching smooth‑tree rates when no violations exist and approaching structure‑blind search when violations are dense.

By Michael Jerge, Suman Jana
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

OPTS-TTPO: Enhancing Finite-Sample Policy-Gradient Learning with Tree Search

arXiv:2609.40035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The policy-gradient theorem gives the exact gradient under the current policy, but finite on-policy samples may miss rare high-return trajectories. We...

By Junyu Lu, Shichao Weng, Zhiqiang Wang, Haojie Luo, Jingfan Zhang, Yuhua Zhou, Cheng Du, Yuzhuo Zhang, Xi Li, Jinwei Du, Tiancheng Feng, Chuan Xiao, Shuyuan Zheng
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Do More Agents Help? Evaluating Accuracy and Cost in LLM Multi-Agent Workflows

The paper introduces BenchAgent, a framework for evaluating multi‑agent large language model (LLM) workflows against a single‑agent baseline, BenchAgent Core. Using GPT‑4.1 across ten reasoning, coding, and tool‑use benchmarks, the study compares six multi‑agent configurations, finding that EvoAgent achieves the highest mean pooled accuracy (79.70%) while other agents lag by 1.71–8.76 percentage points. The analysis also highlights trade‑offs in token consumption and accuracy, offering guidance for selecting and optimizing LLM multi‑agent workflows.

By Yuhang Fu, Ruishan Fang, Jiaqi Shao, Huiyu Zheng, Zhengtao Zhu, Bing Luo, Zhenyu Wen, Tao Lin
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Exploit More, Explore Smarter for Budget-Constrained Agentic Search

The paper introduces ExTS, a tree‑search policy designed for budget‑constrained agentic search where evaluation and generation costs are high. ExTS treats expansion as a value‑of‑information decision, combining discriminative reward shaping, a stochastic virtual child, and quality‑conditioned branching to allocate budget more effectively. Experiments on prompt optimization, code generation, molecular structure elucidation, and agentic workflow optimization show ExTS matching or surpassing task‑specific baselines with an average gain of +5.5% using a single configuration, and the authors also present pilot‑run diagnostics to guide adaptation to different problem structures.

By Haoyang Fang, Bernie Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

EarlyEval: Cheaper Agent Evaluation via Early Outcome Prediction

EarlyEval introduces a lightweight framework that predicts an LLM agent’s final outcome early in its execution, allowing the run to halt when a LightGBM classifier reaches a calibrated confidence threshold. By training success and failure classifiers on behavioral, textual, and reference-solution features, EarlyEval can cut 13%-26% of agent steps and up to 44.1% of input tokens while maintaining 89%-97% prediction accuracy. Across three benchmarks—SWE-bench Verified, TerminalBench, and Toolathlon—this approach reduces evaluation costs with minimal impact on per-agent resolve rates.

By Yuling Shi, Zhensu Sun, Junsen Dong, Chengcheng Wan, David Lo, Xiaodong Gu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Scores Are Not Decisions: Cost-Aware Stopping for Tool Acquisition in LLM Agents

arXiv:2607. 27083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents increasingly depend on diverse external services such as search engines, databases, and connectors, agent harnesses face a fundamental tool-selection challenge: acquiring too few tools leaves the task under-informed, while too many adds cost, context load, and privacy exposure.

By Yicheng Feng, Yan Zhang, Yan Cheng, Wei Qi