Difficulty-Aware Agent Orchestration in LLM-Powered Workflows

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agentic systems have shown strong capabilities across various tasks. However, existing multi-agent frameworks often rely on static or task-level workflows, which either over-process simple queries or underperform on complex ones, while also neglecting the efficiency-performance trade-offs across heterogeneous LLMs. To address these limitations, we propose Difficulty-Aware Agentic Orchestration (DAAO), a dynamic framework that adapts workflow depth, operator selection, and LLM assignment based on the difficulty of each input query. DAAO comprises three interdependent modules: a variational autoencoder (VAE) for difficulty estimation, a modular operator allocator, and a cost- and performance-aware LLM router. By leveraging heterogeneous LLMs and dynamically tailoring workflows, DAAO enables fine-grained, query-specific reasoning strategies. DAAO outperforms prior multi-agent systems in both accuracy and inference efficiency across six benchmarks. We will release our code and implementation details upon publication.