RobustFlow: Towards Robust Agentic Workflow Generation

Shengxiang Xu, Jiayi Zhang, Shimin Di, Yuyu Luo, Liang Yao, Hanmo Liu, Jia Zhu, Fan Liu, Min-Ling Zhang

Keywords: Agentic Workflow Generation; LLM Agent

Abstract: The automated generation of agentic workflows is a promising frontier for enabling large language models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks. However, our investigation reveals that the robustness of agentic workflow remains a critical, unaddressed challenge. Current methods often generate wildly inconsistent workflows when provided with instructions that are semantically identical but differently phrased. This brittleness severely undermines their reliability and trustworthiness for real-world applications. To quantitatively diagnose this instability, we propose metrics based on nodal and topological similarity to evaluate workflow consistency against common semantic variations such as paraphrasing and noise injection. Subsequently, we further propose a novel training framework, RobustFlow, that leverages preference optimization to teach models invariance to instruction variations. By training on sets of synonymous task descriptions, RobustFlow boosts workflow robustness scores to 70\% - 90\%, which is a substantial improvement over existing approaches. The code is publicly available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RobustFlow-1B19}.

Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning

Submission Number: 5528