FlowCompile: An Optimizing Compiler for Structured LLM Workflows

TL;DR

FlowCompile is a compiler that optimizes structured LLM workflows at compile time, creating a reusable set of configurations to balance accuracy and latency across diverse tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel compile-time approach for global workflow optimization, outperforming existing routing-based methods without retraining.

Findings

FlowCompile achieves up to 6.4x speedup over baselines.

It constructs a reusable configuration set for flexible deployment.

The method outperforms heuristics and routing-based baselines across benchmarks.

Abstract

Structured LLM workflows, where specialized LLM sub-agents execute according to a predefined graph, have become a powerful abstraction for solving complex tasks. Optimizing such workflows, i.e., selecting configurations for each sub-agent to balance accuracy and latency, is challenging due to the combinatorial design space over model choices, reasoning budgets, and workflow structures. Existing cost-aware methods largely treat workflow optimization as a routing problem, selecting a configuration at inference time for each query according to the accuracy-latency objective used during training. We argue that structured LLM workflows can also be optimized from a compilation perspective: before deployment, the system can globally explore the workflow design space and construct a reusable set of workflow-level configurations spanning diverse accuracy-latency trade-offs. Drawing inspiration from machine learning compilers, we introduce FlowCompile, a structured LLM workflow compiler that performs compile-time design space exploration to identify a high-quality, reusable trade-off set. FlowCompile decomposes a workflow into sub-agents, profiles each sub-agent under diverse configurations, and composes these measurements through a structure-aware proxy to estimate workflow-level accuracy and latency. It then identifies diverse high-quality configurations in a single compile-time pass, without retraining or online adaptation. Experiments across diverse workflows and challenging benchmarks show that FlowCompile consistently outperforms heuristically optimized workflow configurations and routing-based baselines, delivering up to 6.4x speedup. The compiled configuration set further serves as a reusable optimization artifact, enabling flexible deployment under varying runtime preferences and supporting downstream selection or routing.