Why Search When You Can Transfer? Amortized Agentic Workflow Design from Structural Priors

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25012v1
• Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:25:00 GMT
• Title: Why Search When You Can Transfer? Amortized Agentic Workflow Design from Structural Priors
• Abstract summary: Automated agentic workflow design currently relies on per-task iterative search.<n>We present SWIFT, a framework that amortizes workflow design into reusable structural priors.<n> SWIFT outperforms the state-of-the-art search-based method on five benchmarks.
• Score: 51.95306551061392
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Automated agentic workflow design currently relies on per-task iterative search, which is computationally prohibitive and fails to reuse structural knowledge across tasks. We observe that optimized workflows converge to a small family of domain-specific topologies, suggesting that this combinatorial search is largely redundant. Building on this insight, we propose SWIFT (Synthesizing Workflows via Few-shot Transfer), a framework that amortizes workflow design into reusable structural priors. SWIFT first distills compositional heuristics and output-interface contracts from contrastive analysis of prior search trajectories across source tasks. At inference time, it conditions a single LLM generation pass on these priors together with cross-task workflow demonstrations to synthesize a complete, executable workflow for an unseen target task, bypassing iterative search entirely. On five benchmarks, SWIFT outperforms the state-of-the-art search-based method while reducing marginal per-task optimization cost by three orders of magnitude. It further generalizes to four additional unseen benchmarks and transfers successfully from GPT-4o-mini to three additional foundation models (Grok, Qwen, Gemma). Controlled ablations reveal that workflow demonstrations primarily transfer topological structure rather than surface semantics: replacing all operator names with random strings still retains over 93% of the full system's average performance.

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