Efficient Agents: Building Effective Agents While Reducing Cost
Ningning Wang, Xavier Hu, Pai Liu, He Zhu, Yue Hou, Heyuan Huang, Shengyu Zhang, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang, Changwang Zhang, Jun Wang, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou
2025-08-07
Summary
This paper talks about studying how to build intelligent agents that use large language models (LLMs) to do tasks well while also keeping costs low. It looks at how to balance between making agents powerful and making them efficient so they don't use too much computing power or money.
What's the problem?
The problem is that as these agents get better at doing complicated multi-step tasks, they also get more expensive and slower to use. This makes it hard to use them widely or at a large scale because of the high cost and resources required.
What's the solution?
The solution involved carefully analyzing how different parts of the agent design affect both cost and performance. The study tested various ways to build these agents on a benchmark to find the best combination that keeps the agent very good at tasks while cutting down costs significantly. This led to a new design called Efficient Agents that keeps almost the same high performance but at much lower cost.
Why it matters?
This matters because making AI agents that are both smart and affordable helps bring powerful technology to more people and applications. It ensures these systems can be used widely without wasting resources or money, making AI more accessible and sustainable in the long run.
Abstract
A study on the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off in LLM-driven agent systems identifies optimal agent framework design to reduce costs while maintaining performance.