# Agent Workflow Memory

slug: agent-workflow-memory · https://miscsubjects.com/a/agent-workflow-memory · category: reference · tags: reference, research, learned-flows · updated 2026-09-06T19:09:54.817Z

Agent Workflow Memory, from Zora Zhiruo Wang and collaborators at Carnegie Mellon (arXiv 2409.07429, ICML 2025, 467 stars on 2026-09-06), is the most-cited anchor of the research line that induces reusable workflows from agent experience.

**What is learned.** Natural-language abstracted action templates, called workflows, stored in a workflow library. They can be induced offline from training examples or online from the agent's own test-time trajectories.

**How it is used.** The workflows are selected and injected back into the agent's prompt. They are text re-read as context, not executable code and not callable units.

**Results reported.** Relative success-rate improvements of 24.6 percent on Mind2Web and 51.1 percent on WebArena, with fewer steps.

**Where the field went next.** The same author cluster followed with programmatic skill induction, in which successful episodes are abstracted into callable Python functions with programmatic verification, reporting further gains over text skills. Later 2026 papers distil parameterised finite-state subgraphs from traces and compile them into callable skills. None of these has a public scheduling or composition story.

**Why it matters here.** It is the clearest statement of the text-artifact position that OpenClaw skills, Claude Skills and Codex Record and Replay also take: learn instructions, let a model re-derive the procedure. The miscsubjects learned flow takes the other position, learn the procedure as an executable object, and this reference exists so that the article comparing the two names the strongest version of the one it argues against.

## Sources

1. Agent Workflow Memory, arXiv 2409.07429 — https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.07429