# When Do LLM Agents Help? Deadline-Aware Mixed-Criticality Task Scheduling at the Autonomous-Vehicle Edge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19557/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 5 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06461/) (2015)
- [Evaluating the Efficacy of LLM-Based Reasoning for Multiobjective HPC Job Scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02025/) (2025)
- [SARS: A Resource Selection Algorithm for Autonomous Driving Tasks in Heterogeneous Mobile Edge Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15989/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous vehicles offload latency-sensitive perception tasks to nearby mobile edge computing (MEC) servers, where a missed safety-critical task is unsafe rather than merely degraded. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as adaptive, explainable schedulers, yet evidence of when they help is scarce. We study deadline-aware, mixed-criticality scheduling on heterogeneous MEC servers, where time-critical (TC) tasks must be protected at a controlled cost to best-effort traffic, and ask whether a multi-agent LLM control layer improves on a strong heuristic. We answer in two steps. First we build the heuristic: a windowed contract-net auction that orders each admission window time-critical-first by earliest deadline and places tasks by earliest-finish-time. Across 60 instances on three topologies and 15 baselines under an identical online constraint, it attains a TC completion rate of 0.902, above every baseline (Holm-corrected p < 0.001; best baseline 0.838) and at 0.87 of a CP-SAT upper bound. Second, we add the LLM control plane. A controlled decomposition traces the scheduler's advantage to two ordinary factors, the batching horizon and time-critical-first ordering; the auction, the per-window LLM policy, and online adaptation add nothing while the load is stationary, where the heuristic is already near-optimal. Under a mid-run surge of safety-critical tasks the picture changes, and the LLM control plane gains significantly over both the static heuristic and the bandit. LLM orchestration therefore earns its cost only when non-stationarity opens headroom a fixed policy cannot use. We report control-plane latency and rationale, and release all code and seeded instances.