Optimizing Agentic Workflows using Meta-tools
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents
Abstract (arXiv)
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.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 19 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2026.
Builds on
19 of 35 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2024AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agents26 Jul
- 2024LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems for Software Engineering: Literature Review, Vision and the Road Ahead7 Apr
Other references · 17
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- 2024FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precisioncited by 519
- 2024OS-Copilot: Towards Generalist Computer Agents with Self-Improvementcited by 205
- 2023An LLM Compiler for Parallel Function Callingcited by 179
- 2024Cut the Crap: An Economical Communication Pipeline for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systemscited by 141
- 2025ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agentscited by 136
- 2024Keyformer: KV Cache Reduction through Key Tokens Selection for Efficient Generative Inferencecited by 126
5 more
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- 2025A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Modelscited by 87
- 2024AvaTaR: Optimizing LLM Agents for Tool Usage via Contrastive Reasoningcited by 72
- 2025ECom-Bench: Can LLM Agent Resolve Real-World E-commerce Customer Support Issues?cited by 27
- 2024An LLM-Tool Compiler for Fused Parallel Function Callingcited by 15
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026Speculative Macro Commit for Faster Tool-Using Agentscited by 2
- 2026The Workload-Router-Pool Architecture for LLM Inference Optimization: A Vision Paper from the vLLM Semantic Router Projectcited by 1
- 2026Detect by Yourself: Self-Designing Agentic Workflows for Few-Shot Graph Anomaly Detectioncited by 1
- 2026Auto-Policy, not Auto-Skill: Compiled Agent Skills for the Physical Worldcited by 1
- 2026CIPO: Counterfactual Imagination Policy Optimization for Adaptive Tool Granularity Selectioncited by 0
- 2026CIPO: Counterfactual Imagination Policy Optimization for Adaptive Tool Granularity Selection4 Oct 2026
- 2026Speculative Macro Commit for Faster Tool-Using Agents3 Sep 2026
- 2026Auto-Policy, not Auto-Skill: Compiled Agent Skills for the Physical World25 Aug 2026
- 2026Detect by Yourself: Self-Designing Agentic Workflows for Few-Shot Graph Anomaly Detection26 May 2026
- 2026The Workload-Router-Pool Architecture for LLM Inference Optimization: A Vision Paper from the vLLM Semantic Router Project22 Mar 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026JudgeFlow: Agentic Workflow Optimization via Block Judge
- 2026Learning to Construct Practical Agentic Systems
- 2026AgentFactory: Towards Automated Agentic System Design and Optimization
- 2025EvoAgentX: An Automated Framework for Evolving Agentic Workflows
- 2026FlowScout: From Execution Feedback to Reliable Tool-Using Agent Workflows
- 2024AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation
- 2026MetaRoute-Bench: Evaluating Meta-Decision Policies for Agentic Workflow Routing
- 2026From Static Templates to Dynamic Runtime Graphs: A Survey of Workflow Optimization for LLM Agents