MAS-Loop: Beyond One-Shot Orchestration towards Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems

In LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS), a local mistake can propagate as other agents build on it, turning a correctable error into a failed task. Diagnosing completed runs or repeatedly re-executing them to search for corrections does not provide a learned policy for intervening while execution is still in progress. We present Agent Runtime Inspection and Amendment (ARIA), a framework for learning when and how to repair ongoing multi-agent executions. Our key intuition is to turn execution-verified repairs into reusable supervision, moving repair search into data construction and training so that a learned model can intervene at runtime without repeatedly testing alternatives. First, we collect over 24{,}000 successful and failed trajectories across four multi-agent frameworks, six benchmarks, and eight host models. From these trajectories, we construct the ARIA dataset, to our knowledge the first large-scale dataset pairing failed multi-agent trajectories with execution-verified repairs. It contains 3{,}953 verified repair pairs, each specifying what went wrong, where to intervene, and how execution should continue. Then, we develop the ARIA framework for MAS-agnostic runtime inspection and amendment, designed to integrate with any MAS that exposes execution trajectories and supports continuation replacement. Using verified repairs as training examples, we teach a compact model to recognize when intervention is needed and how to correct an ongoing run. The aim is to learn repair strategies that apply to related failures in new configurations, rather than merely reproduce individual corrections. Finally, the trained ARIA model demonstrates strong repair performance in both post-hoc and runtime settings, with generalization to unseen frameworks and host models. Our code is available at https://github.com/LabRAI/ARIA.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly deployed to solve complex tasks. In case of incorrect or unsatisfactory outputs, users have to manually locate agent mistakes by inspecting agent trajectories (i.e., {\em failure attribution}) and provide feedback to refine the outputs (i.e., {\em repair}). Despite some recent work in MAS failure attribution, automated mechanisms to recover from such mistakes remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose MARS, a search-based framework that formulates MAS repair as a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) process and navigates the vast space of potential repairs via diagnosis-guided expansion with taxonomy-augmented evaluation. Unlike standard MCTS, which evaluates a complete simulation via full rollout, MARS evaluates the agent trajectory using partial rollout to reduce token consumption. Furthermore, we introduce StateMAS, a large-scale MAS repair benchmark with 1,310 replayable multi-agent failure trajectories spanning four types of agent architectures and four LLM backbones. Experiments on StateMAS demonstrate that MARS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an absolute improvement from 3.0% to 12.1% across all settings, while maintaining a comparable token consumption cost. The ablation study further confirms that taxonomy-augmented evaluation and diagnosis-guided expansion are critical to achieving these performance gains.

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) can solve complex problems beyond the reach of a single agent by decomposing tasks and coordinating complementary capabilities. Despite extensive research on MAS, existing work largely focuses on specific aspects or individual phases of their development and operation, resulting in fragmented perspectives with objectives and signals that are difficult to reconcile across these different settings. To bridge these disconnected perspectives, we conceptualize MAS development and operation as a three-phase lifecycle spanning design-time orchestration before execution, runtime intervention during execution, and post-hoc attribution after execution, and introduce MAS-Gate, a unified node-centric quantification applicable across these phases. Modeling each execution as a directed acyclic graph, MAS-Gate combines within-node utility, which estimates a node's contribution through changes in reference-answer likelihood, with inter-node strength, which approximates semantic uptake and potential downstream reach. We adapt this shared quantification to three objectives: providing a structure-aware dense reward for Orchestrator training, training an Editor to act on execution prefixes using paired rewards from completed edited and unedited trajectories, and supplying risk-ranked nodes as auxiliary evidence for LLM-based post-hoc attribution. Experiments spanning interaction environments, knowledge-intensive multi-hop question answering, general reasoning, and post-hoc attribution demonstrate that MAS-Gate improves workflow construction, targeted runtime editing, and LLM-assisted error localization over corresponding phase-specific baselines. Together, these results establish MAS-Gate as a unified structural interface for improving MAS generation, dynamic editing, and error attribution throughout the lifecycle.