Batch Query Processing and Optimization for Agentic Workflows

Abstract: LLMs in agentic workflows combine multi-step reasoning, tool use, and collaboration across multiple specialized agents. Existing LLM serving engines optimize indi- vidual calls in isolation, while multi-agent frameworks focus on orchestration without system-level performance planning. As a result, repeated prompts, overlapping contexts, and concurrent ex- ecutions create substantial redundancy and poor GPU utilization, especially in batch analytics scenarios. We introduce Halo, a system that brings batch query processing and optimization into agentic LLM workflows. Halo represents each workflow as a structured query plan DAG and constructs a consoli- dated graph for batched queries that exposes shared computation. Guided by a cost model that jointly considers prefill and decode costs, cache reuse, and GPU placement, Halo performs plan-level op- timization to minimize redundant execution. Its runtime integrates adaptive batching, KV-cache sharing and migration, along with compute-communication overlap to maximize hardware efficiency. Evaluation across six benchmarks shows that Halo achieves up to 18.6x speedup for batch inference and 4.7x throughput im- provement under online serving, scaling to workloads of tens of thousands of queries and complex graphs. These gains are achieved without compromising output quality. By unifying query optimiza- tion with LLM serving, Halo enables efficient agentic workflows in data analytics and decision-making applications.