Experiments across diverse multi-agent workloads show that AGAO improves task effectiveness while reducing unnecessary computation, latency, and token consumption compared with existing graph-based execution strategies.
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) enable autonomous agents for reasoning, planning, and tool use. Recent systems increasingly organize these agents as graphs of specialized, interconnected nodes. Although graph-based orchestration supports flexible decomposition and coordination, it creates a key challenge: \textbf{attention allocation}. As workflows grow, existing approaches often execute graph components uniformly, wasting resources on irrelevant or low-impact tasks. We introduce \textbf{Attention Orchestration}, a paradigm that extends Transformer-style attention from token representations to workflow-level agent coordination. Our framework, \textbf{Adaptive Goal-aware Attention Orchestration (AGAO)}, dynamically estimates agent importance based on user objectives, graph dependencies, and computational constraints. AGAO combines three components: (1) goal-aware attention, measuring semantic relevance between user goals and agent capabilities; (2) topology-aware attention, modeling structural dependencies in agent graphs; and (3) resource-aware attention, allocating budgets and execution priorities across heterogeneous agents. Together, these mechanisms transform static agent graphs into adaptive systems that focus computation on goal-critical reasoning paths. Experiments across diverse multi-agent workloads show that AGAO improves task effectiveness while reducing unnecessary computation, latency, and token consumption compared with existing graph-based execution strategies. Our work establishes \textbf{Attention Engineering} as a direction for scalable, intelligent multi-agent systems. Code: https://github.com/MingzhouFan97/AGAO.
GABench is introduced, a comprehensive benchmark for agentic graph analysis that covers four graph analysis task categories: graph retrieval, graph theory, graph machine learning, and graph open-ended question answering and provides practical insights into the development and evaluation of LLM agents for graph analysis.
Jiarui Tan, Zhongjian Zhang, YaBo Guo et al.· 0 citations
Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have attracted significant research attention due to their ability to coordinate specialised agents for complex reasoning tasks. Their deployment within static, sequential multi-agent pipelines introduces communication overhead, KV cache management challenges, and increased token consumption. Recent empirical studies report that iterative refinement stages can account for up to 59.4% of total token consumption in software engineering workflows, with an average 2:1 input-to-output token ratio highlighting the impact of communication overhead in conventional architectures. This survey presents a systematic taxonomy and technical review of dynamic orchestration strategies designed to address these constraints. We examine routing and orchestration approaches including Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based frameworks, semantic routing methods, graph-based optimisation techniques, and search-driven workflow planners, analysing their decision logic, computational overhead, and infrastructure trade-offs. We further review distributed state management techniques—including structurally lossless context trimming, tiered agentic memory systems, and test-time error pruning—that aim to mitigate state accumulation and reduce error propagation. A dedicated analysis of cost-aware routing via linear programming highlights the potential benefits of difficulty-aware model dispatch. Finally, we discuss hardware-aware routing and automated failure attribution as promising directions for future research. The surveyed literature highlights the growing importance of orchestration strategies, routing mechanisms, resource management techniques, and system-level evaluation methodologies for scalable deployment.
Heet Nagoriya, H. Raithatha· International Journal of Kno...· 0 citations
Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) have shown exceptional promise for complex tasks, including retrieval-augmented generation and autonomous data analytics. However, their deployment in resource-constrained industrial environments faces critical challenges, such as unpredictable end-to-end latency, low task success rates, and expensive operational costs. Existing orchestration strategies for LLM-MAS mainly rely on static heuristics, implicit LLM-based routing, or reinforcement learning, which suffer from brittleness under workload drift, prohibitive online exploration costs, and inherent governance risks. To address these issues, we propose G-STAR, a general graph-based scheduling framework that formalizes complex MAS pipelines as attributed Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). Specifically, G-STAR decouples its learning pipeline into three critical stages to ensure both system stability and execution efficiency. First, we build a data layer that logs fine-grained signals for agent node (e.g., execution latency, token I/O, model IDs, resource metrics) and task-grounded outcomes (e.g., accuracy, cost, SLA), yielding a trace-driven dataset. Second, we train an offline GNN model to predict optimal dynamic routing decisions, including agent activation, concurrency-constrained Top-K selection, and execution ordering, conditioned on the evolving graph state. Finally, a lightweight dispatcher deploys the pre-trained GNN model for single-forward-pass routing with negligible computational overhead. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks and our real-world production workload confirm G-STAR's superiority over static and LLM-driven baselines. It maintains competitive task quality while reducing latency variability and consistently improving end-to-end latency. Furthermore, we develop an industry-grade orchestration stack with asynchronous execution, resilient serving, and audit-friendly artifacts, offering a practical solution for optimizing web-scale deployments of complex MAS pipelines.
Jiabao Song, Yunsheng Xia, Beibei Kong et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
Large Language Model (LLM) applications increasingly rely on multi-agent and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures to solve complex, knowledge-intensive tasks. However, when deployed as generic platforms serving multiple customers and heterogeneous user groups, existing systems often rely on agent-level routing and prompt hardcoding, leading to poor modularity, limited reuse, and weak controllability. In particular, current approaches lack an explicit abstraction for modeling system capabilities and controlling which capabilities are accessible to different users. We propose an expert-guided multi-agent architecture that separates execution from capability modeling. Agents are responsible for LLM interaction and tool execution, while experts represent indivisible business or task capabilities and guide agent orchestration through dynamic prompt injection. This design enables a generic, multi-instance system in which different customer deployments and user groups share the same agent implementations while exposing different capability sets at the business level. The architecture enforces strong guarantees in terms of answerability, traceability, and controllability. A first working implementation has been developed, and an open-source release is currently in preparation.
Ying Zhang, M. Guillaume, Edouard Leleux et al.· 2026 6th International Confe...· 0 citations
This paper argues that genuine enterprise productivity gains require proactive agents: systems that surface relevant, actionable information to workers before they ask, and proposes the Context Graph, a live relational data structure that models enterprise entities, their relationships, and state transitions over time.
A semantic-uncertainty-guided orchestration approach, HASSUM is introduced as a general framework for uncertainty-aware coordination in multi-agent systems and suggests that semantic uncertainty is a practical and general-purpose signal for improving robustness and trustworthiness in agentic AI systems.
John Knowlton, Aritra Guha, Risto Miikkulainen· 0 citations