SCALE: Scalable Cross-Attention Learning with Extrapolation for Agentic Workflow Scheduling
Zhifei Xu, Jierui Lan, Zixuan Liang, Aiji Liang, Jinxi He
Abstract
Agentic Large Language Model (LLM) systems decompose complex tasks into workflow Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) whose primitives must be scheduled on heterogeneous clusters. Existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) schedulers are tied to a fixed cluster size and require retraining whenever the number of servers changes. We propose SCALE (Scalable Cross-Attention Learning with Extrapolation), a DRL scheduler that generalizes to unseen cluster scales without fine-tuning. SCALE employs a cross-attention pointer network where task features query against server features, so the architecture accepts any number of servers by construction. We observe, however, that permutation-invariant architecture alone does not guarantee good performance at new scales - the attention feature undergoes distribution shift as the server count grows. To counter this, we introduce Structured Representation Regularization (SRR): a decorrelation loss combined with a KL penalty toward the standard normal, which keeps feature statistics stable regardless of input size. Trained on 16 nodes and tested directly on 32 and 48 nodes, SCALE reduces average response time by 8.9% at N=48 relative to the same architecture without SRR, confirming that explicit regularization is necessary to close the scale-generalization gap.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.