When Do Prompt-Side Agent Playbooks Transfer? Accuracy, Cost, and Runtime Shift in Agent Deployment

2026-08-06

AI Summary

This study systematically evaluates the transferability of frozen prompt scripts—those deployed without retraining—across diverse environments, with a focus on their impact on accuracy, inference cost, and runtime behavior. Employing a unified distillation–validation–transfer protocol, experiments are conducted on benchmarks including ALFWorld, TAU2-Bench, and XBench-DeepSearch, enabling the first quantitative assessment of how runtime latency and cost shifts constrain transfer performance. The findings reveal that script transfer is highly condition-dependent, showing effectiveness only in specific scenarios—such as when distillation-based prompting outperforms fixed exemplars—while most transfer paths yield negligible gains and often trigger issues like redundant queries, premature termination, and cost surges. These results suggest that frozen scripts should be treated as conditional cold-start options rather than default reusable strategies, underscoring the necessity of rigorous validation in target environments.

Abstract

Prompt-side playbooks can improve tool-using language agents without retraining, but their portability beyond the source setting is unclear. We study frozen playbook transfer under a shared distill--validate--transfer protocol. On ALFWorld, transfer is beneficial under controlled greedy decoding and, in one near-budget-matched comparison, distilled guidance outperforms five fixed demonstrations. On TAU2-Bench, a prespecified aggregate contrast supports a modest average matched-domain advantage, but global Holm correction retains only one of 135 route-level effects; the remaining grid provides descriptive evidence of compatibility-sensitive heterogeneity. On XBench-DeepSearch, one artifact--runtime pairing preserves useful first-try heuristics while producing repeated queries, delayed stopping, and substantial cost inflation after a context-runtime shift. Across benchmarks, transferred and target-derived playbooks both require target-side validation of success, termination, protocol compatibility, and cost. Frozen transfer is therefore a conditional cold-start option, not a reuse-by-default strategy or a universally preferable alternative to target-side redistillation.

Problem

• prompt-side playbooks
• agent transfer
• tool-using language agents
• deployment shift
• cost and runtime

Innovation

• prompt-side playbooks
• frozen transfer
• distill-validate-transfer protocol
• agent deployment
• cost-runtime shift