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arXiv · 2509.21834

RobustFlow: Towards Robust Agentic Workflow Generation

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

The automated generation of agentic workflows is a promising frontier for enabling large language models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks. However, the empirical study reveals that existing agentic workflow generation methods are not robust. They often generate inconsistent workflows when provided with instructions that are semantically equivalent but phrased differently. This brittleness severely undermines their reliability in real-world applications. To tackle this challenge, we propose RobustFlow, a robust agentic workflow generation system that leverages preference optimization to learn invariance across instruction variations. We also introduce a benchmark of semantically equivalent instruction variants with node-level and graph-level metrics for evaluating workflow generation robustness. By training on these instruction variants, RobustFlow achieves workflow generation robustness scores of 70\%--90\% across diverse perturbations, outperforming existing approaches including AFlow and ScoreFlow. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/DEFENSE-SEU/RobustFlow.

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Shengxiang Xu, Jiayi Zhang, Shimin Di, Yuyu Luo, Liang Yao, Hanmo Liu, Jia Zhu, Min-Ling Zhang. 2026-08-14. RobustFlow: Towards Robust Agentic Workflow Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21834

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