FedAgentKE: Federated Semantic Knowledge Evolution for Heterogeneous Agents

We propose a federated learning-like framework, Federation over Text (FoT), that enables multiple clients solving different tasks to collectively generate a shared library of metacognitive insights by iteratively federating their local reasoning processes without sharing actual problem instances or task instructions. Instead of federation over gradients (e.g., as in distributed training), FoT operates at the semantic level without any gradient optimization or supervision signal. Iteratively, each client runs an LLM agent that does local thinking and self-improvement on their specific tasks independently, and shares reasoning traces with a central server, which aggregates and distills them into a cross-task (and cross-domain) insight library that existing and future agents can leverage to improve performance on related tasks. Experiments show that FoT improves reasoning effectiveness and efficiency across a wide range of challenging applications, including mathematical problem solving, cross-domain collaboration, real-world daily tasks, and machine learning research insight discovery. Specifically, it improves average performance scores by 25% while reducing the reasoning tokens by 4% across the first three applications. In the research insight discovery application, FoT is able to generate insights that cover over 80% of the major contributions in the subsequent papers.

Modern LLM agents increasingly rely on skill libraries to handle complex tasks, making skill evolution a primary driver of self-improvement. However, isolated single-user task streams lack the diversity required to build comprehensive skills. While cross-user collaboration can overcome this data bottleneck, current trajectory-sharing approaches compromise user privacy and impose a uniform global library that fails to accommodate client heterogeneity. We introduce FederatedSkill, a privacy-preserving framework for collaborative agent evolution. Moving beyond raw trajectory sharing, FederatedSkill utilizes semantic skill diffs, structured patches over local libraries, as the fundamental unit of communication. On the server side, an evolution agent aggregates these patches to dynamically model client-specific capability boundaries, facilitating strictly personalized skill evolution rather than a suboptimal global average. Evaluated across 20 distinct agent task families, FederatedSkill demonstrates substantial gains over self-evolving baselines, achieving up to a 44.4% increase in success rate and a 37.5% reduction in computational cost.

Autonomous agents operating in open-world tasks -- where the completion boundary is not given in advance -- face denominator blindness: they systematically underestimate the scope of the target space. Forage V1 addressed this through co-evolving evaluation (an independent Evaluator discovers what "complete" means) and method isolation (Evaluator and Planner cannot see each other's code). V2 extends the architecture from a single expedition to a learning organization: experience accumulates across runs, transfers across model capabilities, and institutional safeguards prevent knowledge degradation. We demonstrate two claims across three task types (web scraping, API queries, mathematical reasoning). Knowledge accumulation: over six runs, knowledge entries grow from 0 to 54, and denominator estimates stabilize as domain understanding deepens. Knowledge transfer: a weaker agent (Sonnet) seeded with a stronger agent's (Opus) knowledge narrows a 6.6pp coverage gap to 1.1pp, halves cost (9.40 to 5.13 USD), converges in half the rounds (mean 4.5 vs. 7.0), and three independent seeded runs arrive at exactly the same denominator estimate (266), suggesting organizational knowledge calibrates evaluation itself. V2's contribution is architectural: it designs institutions -- audit separation, contract protocols, organizational memory -- that make any agent more reliable upon entry. The accumulated experience is organizational, model-agnostic, and transferable, stored as readable documents that any future agent inherits regardless of provider or capability level.