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A Workflow-Aware Serving Layer for Agentic Applications

Overview

Agentic AI applications form an emerging serving workload in which a request creates a workflow: a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of LLM and tool calls that exposes per-node model choices and optional quality operators such as verifiers. This workload falls between two existing layers: model-serving engines (which optimize individual LLM calls) and workflow orchestration frameworks (which manage control flow but not serving-level optimization). This paper proposes a workflow-aware serving layer to bridge this gap.

Key Problem

The Serving Gap for Agentic Workloads

• Agentic requests create DAGs of LLM and tool calls, not single inference requests
• Model-serving engines optimize individual calls but don't understand workflow structure
• Workflow orchestrators manage control flow but don't optimize serving-level metrics
• No existing layer jointly optimizes model selection, resource allocation, and quality verification across the DAG

Key Innovations

Workflow-Aware Serving

• Understands the DAG structure of agentic requests
• Optimizes across the entire workflow, not just individual nodes
• Enables per-node model selection based on workflow-level objectives

Quality Operators

• Optional verifiers and quality checks at workflow nodes
• Trade-off between quality and latency/cost at each DAG node
• Workflow-aware placement of quality operators for optimal end-to-end performance

Per-Node Model Choices

• Different LLMs can be selected for different nodes in the workflow
• Model selection considers node-specific requirements (reasoning depth, output format, etc.)
• Enables cost optimization by using smaller models where sufficient

Methodology

1. Workflow DAG Representation: Model agentic requests as DAGs with LLM and tool call nodes
2. Serving Optimization: Joint optimization of model selection, batching, and resource allocation across DAG
3. Quality Operator Integration: Optional verifier nodes with workflow-aware placement
4. Performance Metrics: End-to-end latency, throughput, cost, and quality trade-offs

Implications

• New serving infrastructure layer purpose-built for agentic AI workloads
• Bridges the gap between model serving and workflow orchestration
• Per-node model selection enables significant cost optimization
• Quality operators as first-class citizens in the serving stack
• Essential infrastructure for production agentic AI deployments

Pitfalls

• Workflow DAGs may be dynamic and hard to predict at request time
• Per-node model selection adds scheduling complexity
• Quality operator placement is an optimization problem that may not scale
• Interaction with existing serving engines (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM) needs integration work
• Benchmarking agentic serving workloads is an open problem

Activation Keywords

agentic serving, workflow-aware, LLM serving, DAG orchestration, quality operators, verifiers, agentic workload, serving infrastructure, per-node model selection, workflow optimization

Paper Reference

arXiv:2607.02942 - "A Workflow-Aware Serving Layer for Agentic Applications" (Jul 2026)