Towards Efficient Agents: A Co-Design of Inference Architecture and System

TL;DR

This paper introduces AgentInfer, a comprehensive framework that significantly improves the efficiency of LLM-based agents by optimizing inference architecture and system design, enabling faster, more scalable autonomous reasoning.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel, integrated system combining hierarchical reasoning, cache-aware scheduling, speculative decoding, and semantic compression for end-to-end agent acceleration.

Findings

Over 50% reduction in ineffective token consumption

Achieves 1.8-2.5x speedup in agent reasoning tasks

Maintains accuracy while enhancing efficiency

Abstract

The rapid development of large language model (LLM)-based agents has unlocked new possibilities for autonomous multi-turn reasoning and tool-augmented decision-making. However, their real-world deployment is hindered by severe inefficiencies that arise not from isolated model inference, but from the systemic latency accumulated across reasoning loops, context growth, and heterogeneous tool interactions. This paper presents AgentInfer, a unified framework for end-to-end agent acceleration that bridges inference optimization and architectural design. We decompose the problem into four synergistic components: AgentCollab, a hierarchical dual-model reasoning framework that balances large- and small-model usage through dynamic role assignment; AgentSched, a cache-aware hybrid scheduler that minimizes latency under heterogeneous request patterns; AgentSAM, a suffix-automaton-based speculative decoding method that reuses multi-session semantic memory to achieve low-overhead inference acceleration; and AgentCompress, a semantic compression mechanism that asynchronously distills and reorganizes agent memory without disrupting ongoing reasoning. Together, these modules form a Self-Evolution Engine capable of sustaining efficiency and cognitive stability throughout long-horizon reasoning tasks. Experiments on the BrowseComp-zh and DeepDiver benchmarks demonstrate that through the synergistic collaboration of these methods, AgentInfer reduces ineffective token consumption by over 50%, achieving an overall 1.8-2.5 times speedup with preserved accuracy. These results underscore that optimizing for agentic task completion-rather than merely per-token throughput-is the key to building scalable, efficient, and self-improving intelligent systems.