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Efficient Agents: Building Effective Agents While Reducing Cost

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arxiv 2508.02694 v1 pith:CTUKKGOY submitted 2025-07-24 cs.AI cs.CLcs.MA

Efficient Agents: Building Effective Agents While Reducing Cost

classification cs.AI cs.CLcs.MA
keywords agentagentsefficientframeworksystemsaccessibilitycomplexitycost-of-pass
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM)-driven agents have enabled sophisticated systems to tackle complex, multi-step tasks, but their escalating costs threaten scalability and accessibility. This work presents the first systematic study of the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off in modern agent systems, addressing the critical need for cost-effective designs without sacrificing performance. We investigate three key questions: (1) How much complexity do agentic tasks inherently require? (2) When do additional modules yield diminishing returns? (3) How much efficiency can be gained through the design of efficient agent frameworks? Through an empirical analysis on the GAIA benchmark, we evaluate the impact of LLM backbone selection, agent framework designs, and test-time scaling strategies. Using the cost-of-pass metric, we quantify the efficiency-performance trade-off across these dimensions. Our findings inform the development of Efficient Agents , a novel agent framework that has an optimal complexity to task requirements. Efficient Agents retains 96.7% of the performance of OWL, one leading open-source agent framework, while reducing operational costs from $0.398 to $0.228, resulting in a 28.4% improvement in cost-of-pass. Our work provides actionable insights for designing efficient, high-performing agent systems, advancing the accessibility and sustainability of AI-driven solutions.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. The Hidden Footprint: Making Storage a First-Class Metric for LLM Agent Evaluation

    cs.AI 2026-07 accept novelty 7.0

    Storage footprint is a measurable, independent resource axis for LLM agents: equally accurate configurations differ 15.7× in retained bytes and most of the spread is removable duplication.

  2. The Hidden Footprint: Making Storage a First-Class Metric for LLM Agent Evaluation

    cs.AI 2026-07 accept novelty 7.0

    Equal-accuracy LLM agent defaults differ by up to 15.7× in post-run disk retention, and a serialization-aware benchmark plus fixed-trace control make storage a reportable metric alongside accuracy and reconstructability.

  3. Only Ask What You Don't Know: Grounded Delta Planning for Efficient Multi-step RAG

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    GDP-RAG targets only information deltas in multi-hop RAG through preliminary grounding, gap-conditioned prompts, and skeletal trajectories, reaching 60.63% accuracy at 0.51 cost-of-pass on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, a...

  4. CAM: A Causality-based Analysis Framework for Multi-Agent Code Generation Systems

    cs.SE 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0

    CAM ranks how much each intermediate output of a multi-agent code-generation system causally matters for final correctness, then uses that ranking to repair failures and prune features.

  5. AtlasVA: Self-Evolving Visual Skill Memory for Teacher-Free VLM Agents

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    AtlasVA organizes VLM agent memory into spatial heatmaps, visual exemplars, and symbolic skills, evolving atlases from trajectories to act as potential-based shaping rewards in teacher-free reinforcement learning.

  6. Cost and Accuracy of Long-Term Memory in Distributed Multi-Agent Systems Based on Large Language Models

    cs.IR 2026-01 reject novelty 5.0

    A two-framework testbed comparison claims mem0 is Pareto-optimal over Graphiti for distributed LLM agents because its lower cost is paired with accuracy that is not significantly different.

  7. Toward Efficient Agents: Memory, Tool learning, and Planning

    cs.AI 2026-01 conditional novelty 3.0

    A survey that organizes efficiency techniques for LLM agents into memory, tool learning, and planning, and consolidates benchmarks and metrics for measuring cost-performance trade-offs.