AgentSwift: Efficient LLM Agent Design via Value-guided Hierarchical Search

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Li, Yu, Li, Lehui, Wu, Zhihao, Liao, Qingmin, Hao, Jianye, Shao, Kun, Xu, Fengli, Li, Yong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866918210908979200
author Li, Yu
Li, Lehui
Wu, Zhihao
Liao, Qingmin
Hao, Jianye
Shao, Kun
Xu, Fengli
Li, Yong
author_facet Li, Yu
Li, Lehui
Wu, Zhihao
Liao, Qingmin
Hao, Jianye
Shao, Kun
Xu, Fengli
Li, Yong
contents Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains, yet automated agent design remains a significant challenge. Current automated agent design approaches are often constrained by limited search spaces that primarily optimize workflows but fail to integrate crucial human-designed components like memory, planning, and tool use. Furthermore, these methods are hampered by high evaluation costs, as evaluating even a single new agent on a benchmark can require tens of dollars. The difficulty of this exploration is further exacerbated by inefficient search strategies that struggle to navigate the large design space effectively, making the discovery of novel agents a slow and resource-intensive process. To address these challenges, we propose AgentSwift, a novel framework for automated agent design. We formalize a hierarchical search space that jointly models agentic workflow and composable functional components. This structure moves beyond optimizing workflows alone by co-optimizing functional components, which enables the discovery of more complex and effective agent architectures. To make exploration within this expansive space feasible, we mitigate high evaluation costs by training a value model on a high-quality dataset, generated via a novel strategy combining combinatorial coverage and balanced Bayesian sampling for low-cost evaluation. Guiding the entire process is a hierarchical MCTS strategy, which is informed by uncertainty to efficiently navigate the search space. Evaluated across a comprehensive set of seven benchmarks spanning embodied, math, web, tool, and game domains, AgentSwift discovers agents that achieve an average performance gain of 8.34\% over both existing automated agent search methods and manually designed agents. Our framework serves as a launchpad for researchers to rapidly discover powerful agent architectures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06017
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AgentSwift: Efficient LLM Agent Design via Value-guided Hierarchical Search
Li, Yu
Li, Lehui
Wu, Zhihao
Liao, Qingmin
Hao, Jianye
Shao, Kun
Xu, Fengli
Li, Yong
Computation and Language
Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains, yet automated agent design remains a significant challenge. Current automated agent design approaches are often constrained by limited search spaces that primarily optimize workflows but fail to integrate crucial human-designed components like memory, planning, and tool use. Furthermore, these methods are hampered by high evaluation costs, as evaluating even a single new agent on a benchmark can require tens of dollars. The difficulty of this exploration is further exacerbated by inefficient search strategies that struggle to navigate the large design space effectively, making the discovery of novel agents a slow and resource-intensive process. To address these challenges, we propose AgentSwift, a novel framework for automated agent design. We formalize a hierarchical search space that jointly models agentic workflow and composable functional components. This structure moves beyond optimizing workflows alone by co-optimizing functional components, which enables the discovery of more complex and effective agent architectures. To make exploration within this expansive space feasible, we mitigate high evaluation costs by training a value model on a high-quality dataset, generated via a novel strategy combining combinatorial coverage and balanced Bayesian sampling for low-cost evaluation. Guiding the entire process is a hierarchical MCTS strategy, which is informed by uncertainty to efficiently navigate the search space. Evaluated across a comprehensive set of seven benchmarks spanning embodied, math, web, tool, and game domains, AgentSwift discovers agents that achieve an average performance gain of 8.34\% over both existing automated agent search methods and manually designed agents. Our framework serves as a launchpad for researchers to rapidly discover powerful agent architectures.
title AgentSwift: Efficient LLM Agent Design via Value-guided Hierarchical Search
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06017