# Agent Workflow Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.07429 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07429/

## Key facts

- Cited by 383 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 25 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14573/) (2024)
- [WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07718/) (2024)
- [Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10088/) (2023)
- [Language to Rewards for Robotic Skill Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08647/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Tool Makers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17126/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08802/) (2018)
- [AdaPlanner: Adaptive Planning from Feedback with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16653/) (2023)
- [Synapse: Trajectory-as-Exemplar Prompting with Memory for Computer Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07863/) (2023)
- [DreamCoder: Growing generalizable, interpretable knowledge with wake-sleep Bayesian program learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08381/) (2020)
- [AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15711/) (2024)
- [Autonomous Evaluation and Refinement of Digital Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06474/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Task Generalization with Multi-Task Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05064/) (2017)
- [CLIN: A Continually Learning Language Agent for Rapid Task Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10134/) (2023)
- [Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Program Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14502/) (2022)
- [TroVE: Inducing Verifiable and Efficient Toolboxes for Solving Programmatic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12869/) (2024)
- [Top-Down Synthesis for Library Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16605/) (2022)
- [What Are Tools Anyway? A Survey from the Language Model Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15452/) (2024)
- [LILO: Learning Interpretable Libraries by Compressing and Documenting Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19791/) (2023)
- [BAGEL: Bootstrapping Agents by Guiding Exploration with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08140/) (2024)
- [Learning Reusable Manipulation Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03293/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 383)

- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13657/) (2025)
- [Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04618/) (2025)
- [Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02644/) (2024)
- [ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25140/) (2025)
- [SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08234/) (2026)
- [WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02337/) (2024)
- [Plan-and-Act: Improving Planning of Agents for Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09572/) (2025)
- [SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07079/) (2025)
- [Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25158/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21046/) (2025)
- [ShieldAgent: Shielding Agents via Verifiable Safety Policy Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22738/) (2025)
- [SimpleMem: Efficient Lifelong Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02553/) (2026)
- [MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02474/) (2026)
- [Evo-Memory: Benchmarking LLM Agent Test-time Learning with Self-Evolving Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20857/) (2025)
- [ST-WebAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Safety and Trustworthiness in Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06703/) (2024)
- [Memento: Fine-tuning LLM Agents without Fine-tuning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16153/) (2025)
- [Web Agents with World Models: Learning and Leveraging Environment Dynamics in Web Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13232/) (2024)
- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13334/) (2025)
- [Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06821/) (2025)
- [In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08026/) (2025)
- [How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16067/) (2025)
- [AutoGLM: Autonomous Foundation Agents for GUIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00820/) (2024)
- [MemEvolve: Meta-Evolution of Agent Memory Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18746/) (2025)
- [Agent KB: Leveraging Cross-Domain Experience for Agentic Problem Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06229/) (2025)
- [Perception, Reason, Think, and Plan: A Survey on Large Multimodal Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04921/) (2025)
- [Lifelong Learning of Large Language Model based Agents: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07278/) (2025)
- [Beyond Browsing: API-Based Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16464/) (2024)
- [SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04804/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the potential of language model-based agents to solve real-world tasks such as web navigation, current methods still struggle with long-horizon tasks with complex action trajectories. In contrast, humans can flexibly solve complex tasks by learning reusable task workflows from past experiences and using them to guide future actions. To build agents that can similarly benefit from this process, we introduce Agent Workflow Memory (AWM), a method for inducing commonly reused routines, i.e., workflows, and selectively providing workflows to the agent to guide subsequent generations. AWM flexibly applies to both offline and online scenarios, where agents induce workflows from training examples beforehand or from test queries on the fly. We experiment on two major web navigation benchmarks -- Mind2Web and WebArena -- that collectively cover 1000+ tasks from 200+ domains across travel, shopping, and social media, among others. AWM substantially improves the baseline results by 24.6% and 51.1% relative success rate on Mind2Web and WebArena while reducing the number of steps taken to solve WebArena tasks successfully. Furthermore, online AWM robustly generalizes in cross-task, website, and domain evaluations, surpassing baselines from 8.9 to 14.0 absolute points as train-test task distribution gaps widen.