Apr 17, 2026, cs.LGJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Yi Xie, Yangyang Xu, Yi Fan, Bo Liu
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona, USA · Department of Mathematical Sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York, USA · Amazon Web Services New York, USA
Large language models (LLMs) with a large number of parameters achieve strong performance but are often prohibitively expensive to deploy. Recent work explores using teams of smaller, more efficient LLMs that collectively match or even outperform a single large model. However, jointly updating multiple agents introduces compounding distribution shifts, making coordination and stability during training difficult. We address this by introducing Sequential Agent Tuning (SAT), a coordinator-free training paradigm. SAT represents the team as a factorized policy and employs block-coordinate updates over agents, enabling scalable, decentralized training without a central controller. Specifically, we develop a sequence-aware, on-policy advantage estimator that conditions on the evolving team policy, coupled with per-agent KL trust regions that isolate occupancy drift. Theoretically, this framework provides two critical guarantees. First, it ensures monotonic improvement, stabilizing the training process. Second, it establishes provable plug-and-play invariance: any agent can be upgraded to a stronger model without retraining the rest of the team, with a formal guarantee that the performance bound improves. Empirically, a team of three 4B agents (12B total) trained with SAT surpasses the much larger Qwen3-32B on AIME24/25 benchmarks by 3.9% on average. We validate our plug-and-play theory by swapping in two 8B agents, which boosts the composite score by 10.4%. We provide code and appendix of proof at https://github.com/Yydc/SAT-AAMAS