about
Compiling Agentic Workflows into LLM Weights (arxiv.org)
2 points by dipankarsarkar 95 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of a separate program feeding instructions to a big chatbot each turn, this trains a small model to hold the whole workflow in its weights. Across travel booking, tech support, and insurance claims, it reached near-frontier quality at about 100 times lower cost.

Abstract · Compiling Agentic Workflows into LLM Weights: Near-Frontier Quality at Two Orders of Magnitude Less Cost

Agent orchestration frameworks have proliferated, collectively exceeding 290,000 GitHub stars across LangGraph, CrewAI, Google ADK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Semantic Kernel, Strands, and LlamaIndex. All follow the same pattern: an external orchestrator above the LLM, injecting instructions and routing decisions every turn. Recent work has shown this architecture is dominated for procedural tasks by simply providing the procedure in a frontier model's system prompt [Dennis et al., 2026a], at the cost of consuming the context window, requiring a frontier model for every conversation, and exposing proprietary procedures to third-party providers. Compiling the procedure into the weights of a small fine-tuned model -- creating a subterranean agent -- should resolve all of these concerns, and prior work (SimpleTOD, FireAct, SynTOD, WorkflowLLM, Agent Lumos) has shown the technique works. Yet developer adoption has overwhelmingly favored orchestration. We identify three perceived barriers and address each empirically across travel booking (14 nodes), Zoom support (14 nodes, product-specific knowledge), and insurance claims (55 nodes, 6 decision hubs).

Simon Dennis, Rivaan Patil, Kevin Shabahang, Hao Guo
arXiv:2605.22502 · cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted May 21, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 19 pages

add comment on HN