FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents

Ruixuan Xiao, Wentao Ma, Ke Wang, Yuchuan Wu, Junbo Zhao, Haobo Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li


Abstract
LLM-based agents have emerged as promising tools, which are crafted to fulfill complex tasks by iterative planning and action. However, these agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. To address this, preliminary attempts are made to enhance planning reliability by incorporating external workflow-related knowledge. Despite the promise, such infused knowledge is mostly disorganized and diverse in formats, lacking rigorous formalization and comprehensive comparisons. Motivated by this, we formalize different formats of workflow knowledge and present FlowBench, the first benchmark for workflow-guided planning. FlowBench covers 51 different scenarios from 6 domains, with knowledge presented in diverse formats. To assess different LLMs on FlowBench, we design a multi-tiered evaluation framework. We evaluate the efficacy of workflow knowledge across multiple formats, and the results indicate that current LLM agents need considerable improvements for satisfactory planning. We hope that our challenging benchmark can pave the way for future agent planning research.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.638
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10883–10900
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.638/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.638
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruixuan Xiao, Wentao Ma, Ke Wang, Yuchuan Wu, Junbo Zhao, Haobo Wang, Fei Huang, and Yongbin Li. 2024. FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 10883–10900, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents (Xiao et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.638.pdf