Overview

Multi-Agent Systems studies how multiple decision-makers interact when they share goals, compete for resources, or have only partial information about one another. Approaches include multi-agent reinforcement learning, game theory and formal verification, decentralized consensus and task allocation, and—more recently—LLM-agent teams organized through roles, workflows, debate, and shared memory. Researchers evaluate these methods in social dilemmas, cooperative robotics and swarms, reasoning and coding benchmarks, and operational settings, measuring success alongside cost, robustness, and fairness. A central open tension is that coordination can improve outcomes but also adds overhead and can spread shared errors, so its benefits depend on the task, communication structure, and agents involved.

Latest papers

677 papers99 papers in the last four weeks, up 29% on the four weeks before. 0.6% of all new papers.

Jun 7, 2026

PhysAgent: Automating Physics-Based 4D Synthesis via Trajectory-Grounded Multi-Agent Feedback

Achieving fully automated, physically plausible 3D motion synthesis is a core objective in graphics and generative AI. However, configuring complex environmental force fields still relies entirely on manual expert intervention, creating a severe bottleneck for large-scale simulation data generation. Existing automated methods primarily focus on material optimization and exhibit severe modality gaps and technical flaws when applied to the vastly more complex force field optimization space: naive Large Language Models (LLMs) lack underlying simulation feedback, causing severe physical inaccuracies, while traditional Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) suffers from sluggish gradients, local optima entrapment, and a mathematical inability to dynamically switch discrete force fields. To address this, we propose PhysAgent, the first simulator-in-the-loop multi-agent framework that leverages multimodal inputs for automated, physically grounded 4D synthesis. By decoupling intrinsic materials from extrinsic dynamics, PhysAgent utilizes a Semantic Agent equipped with an externalized Force Field Skill module to master simulation rules and generate valid initializations. Subsequently, the Refine Agents, driven by Trajectory-Grounded Multi-Agent Feedback, leverage vision foundation models to extract dense point trajectories from rendered frames. By converting these explicit motion trajectories into structured textual descriptors, the agent harnesses LLM commonsense reasoning to execute zero-shot macroscopic leaps, effectively escaping local optima and dynamically switching discrete force fields. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhysAgent rapidly generates stable, diverse physical scenes from arbitrary multimodal prompts, significantly outperforming existing baselines in both generation diversity and physical accuracy.
Jun 6, 2026

Toward Human-Centered Multi-Agent Systems: Integrating Cognition, Culture, Values, and Cooperation in AI Agents

The emergence of large language model (LLM)-based agents and multi-agent systems has enabled a shift from narrow task automation to more autonomous decision-making. Despite progress in language generation, planning, tool use, and coordination, most agents still treat intelligence as prediction, optimization, and task completion. Human environments are social and normative, where people reason under bounded rationality, communicate in culturally situated language, and make decisions guided by values, beliefs, trust, and social norms. This survey argues that future AI agents, especially those acting on behalf of humans, must move beyond task competence toward human-centered capabilities. We review research across six areas: (1) evolution of intelligent agents, (2) human cognition and decision-making, (3) language, culture, and social context, (4) human values and belief systems, (5) human-agent collaboration, and (6) multi-agent coordination and modeling of human characteristics. We synthesize work from cognitive science, sociolinguistics, computational social science, and AI alignment, along with recent advances in LLM agents, cultural alignment benchmarks, preference learning, explainability, and agent societies. We identify a key gap: existing systems do not provide a unified framework integrating cognition, culture, values, and social behavior into autonomous agents. We conclude with directions for building culturally aware, value-aligned, cognitively grounded, and cooperative multi-agent systems.
Jun 6, 2026

Semantic Quorum Assurance: Collective Certification for Non-Deterministic AI Infrastructure

As large language model (LLM) agents are integrated into autonomous cloud operations, distributed systems face a semantic reliability problem: proposer agents can generate production mutations, such as modifying IAM policies, opening firewall security groups, or executing data exports, that are syntactically valid and statically authorized but operationally unsafe. Classical distributed consensus protocols replicate deterministic state transitions but do not evaluate the safety of the proposed intent. To address this gap, we introduce Semantic Quorum Assurance (SQA), a control-plane primitive for governing non-deterministic agentic infrastructure. SQA represents proposals as declarative execution contracts bound to cryptographic evidence chains and routes them to a diverse panel of read-only, sandboxed validator agents. SQA aggregates their judgments under a risk-adaptive quorum predicate that enforces model and archetype diversity, adjusts weights based on calibrated assurance scores, and respects archetype-specific vetoes. Admitted proposals execute only through a sovereign execution gate. We instantiate SQA in a cloud-native control plane and formalize a correlated cognitive failure model for non-deterministic validators. On 500 infrastructure-inspired mutation scenarios, with safety results reported on held-out safe/unsafe trials excluding ambiguous scenarios, SQA reduces unsafe approval from 18.5% for single-agent validation to 0.3% while adding median validation latency of 1.45--4.12 seconds across the studied risk buckets.
Jun 6, 2026

EduMirror: Modeling Educational Social Dynamics with Value-driven Multi-agent Simulation

Understanding how educational social dynamics evolve is critical for informing effective educational policies and counterfactual interventions. However, traditional methods face a fundamental dilemma: observational studies often lack causal power, while controlled experiments are frequently constrained by ethical concerns. Although LLM-based multi-agent simulations offer a scalable in silico alternative, existing approaches remain limited by weak psychological grounding and insufficient measurement of latent psychological states. To address this, we introduce EduMirror, a multi-agent simulator for the scientific study of educational social dynamics. We provide configurable education-oriented agent forms, including value-driven agents grounded in psychological needs and social value orientation, together with a dual-track measurement protocol for quantifying observable behaviors and latent psychological states. We validate the realism and usability of EduMirror through case studies on school bullying and group cooperation, as well as broader evaluations across diverse educational scenarios. The results show that EduMirror generates educational social dynamics that are realistic, theory-consistent, and measurable by empirical criteria. These properties enable structured in silico educational research, providing a computational tool for hypothesis testing and counterfactual intervention analysis in educational science. Project page: https://edumirror.net.
Jun 5, 2026

TianJi-Environ: An Autonomous AI Scientist for Atmospheric Environmental Research

As atmospheric environmental prediction continues to improve, interpretable validation of pollution mechanisms and feedback processes has become a main challenge in atmospheric chemistry. Yet mechanism validation based on complex numerical models still relies heavily on expert knowledge: mechanistic hypotheses must be operationalized into executable experiments, and model outputs must be organized into traceable evidence. We present TianJi-Environ, an auditable AI Scientist for atmospheric-chemistry mechanism validation. TianJi-Environ establishes the first WRF-Chem-based multi-agent framework that autonomously drives complex atmospheric-chemistry simulations, converting mechanistic hypotheses into executable configurations, testing experiments, and evidence criteria. Using ozone response and particulate-matter feedback as two representative examples, we demonstrate TianJi-Environ's capability for mechanism validation. In a summertime ozone case over the North China Plain, the system detects directionally consistent aerosol-radiation-interaction signals in shortwave radiation and boundary-layer height, but judges the evidence for ozone response to NOx control to be incomplete. In a wintertime PM2.5 case over the Guanzhong Basin, it localizes the unsupported link to insufficient propagation from black-carbon perturbation to particulate response and missing diagnostics of vertical absorptive heating. These results show that TianJi-Environ makes expert-driven mechanism validation explicit, structured, and auditable, offering a reproducible paradigm for multi-agent systems coupled with complex atmospheric-chemistry models.
Jun 4, 2026

Beyond Alignment: Value Diversity as a Collective Property in Multicultural Agent Systems

Multicultural multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed in globally diverse settings, where different agents are grounded in different cultural backgrounds. Existing cultural evaluation focuses on value alignment: how closely a single agent matches a target culture. Yet alignment is a per-agent property and cannot reveal whether a system, taken as a whole, preserves the cultural plurality it is meant to represent. We propose value diversity as a system-level evaluation axis for multicultural agent systems, defined through the dissimilarity between culturally conditioned agents' responses on a shared value survey. Using the World Values Survey, we evaluate 19 cultures and 18 backbone models across a wide range of system configurations. We find that diversity is largely uncorrelated with alignment, indicating that the two capture complementary system properties, and that current multicultural agent systems fall substantially below human societies in value diversity. Mixed-backbone systems narrow this gap but do not close it, and the gap persists across culture compositions and agent scales. Social interaction further erodes diversity by driving agents toward consensus, and a participatory budgeting case study shows that this homogenization narrows the breadth of collective decision-making. Together, our results establish value diversity as a distinct evaluation axis for multicultural multi-agent systems and reveal a persistent homogenization tendency in current LLM-based societies. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/iNLP-Lab/MultiAgent-Diversity.
Jun 3, 2026

Ahoy: LLMs Enacting Multiagent Interaction Protocols

An interaction protocol formalizes how the agents in a multiagent system interact, which facilitates implementing agents. Existing approaches yield agent implementations specific to the selected protocols. How can we engineer intelligent agents that can enact protocols but are programming-free? Our contribution, Ahoy, addresses this question by creating LLM agents that dynamically select and enact declarative protocols to achieve user goals. We demonstrate that an Ahoy agent can correctly and intelligently enact multiple protocols - concurrently if appropriate to the user goal - without specialized training. Ahoy's significance lies in that it brings together declarative protocols and LLMs, both approaches that promise improved knowledge engineering for agents.
Jun 3, 2026

Strabo: Declarative Specification and Implementation of Agentic Interaction Protocols

The last few years have witnessed major advances in the modeling and implementation of multiagent systems based on declarative interaction protocols. Our contribution, Strabo, establishes the relevance of these advances to ongoing industry efforts in Agentic AI. Specifically, we consider UCP, the Universal Commerce Protocol, a recent Google-led effort to standardize e-commerce interactions for AI agents. Our exercise is in two parts. One, we model the part of UCP dealing with checkouts as a declarative Langshaw protocol and implement agents using Peach, a programming model for Langshaw. This part of the exercise brings out the advantages of formal, declarative specifications. Two, we show that Peach agents can interoperate with UCP agents implemented by Google, thereby establishing the fidelity of our approach with respect to UCP. Such interoperation enables the incremental introduction of declarative protocols and agents into a conventional setting, indicating a pathway by which EMAS ideas could influence practice without demanding a wholesale update.
Jun 3, 2026

Channel Fracture: Three Instances of Cross-Boundary Silent Delivery Reliability Failures in Multi-Agent Systems

We report the discovery of channel fracture, a silent architectural failure in multi-agent systems where information routed across agent boundaries is silently blocked by invisible constraints. We present three instances in a production Hermes Agent deployment: (1) cron memory injection blocked by scheduler barriers; (2) cross-profile skill routing fractured by recursive directory traversal; (3) WebSocket delivery confirmation fallback fracture causing message duplication. We propose CADVP v1.1, a 13-dimension verification protocol with a veto-level confirmation check. Through 30,012 trials, zero failure rates under protocol versus 69 to 98 percent without. Real-world validation (10,008 trials) confirms quality elevation from 0.90 to 1.00. Three design principles: inverse verification, channel matching, and PIP protection.
Jun 3, 2026

Scaling Datasets for Multi-Sensor, Multi-Agent, and Multi-Domain Learning in Autonomous Systems

Existing datasets cannot support large-scale learning in multi-agent, multi-sensor, or multi-domain autonomy, where diversity and coordination are essential. We present a modular dataset generation pipeline that creates terabyte-scale, ground-truth-labeled data for ground, aerial, and infrastructure-based systems using the AVstack framework and CARLA simulator. Supporting single- and multi-agent configurations with flexible sensor suites, the pipeline enables controllable experimentation across challenging conditions. Representative perception and fusion studies show how generated data can support application-specific training and collaborative autonomy.
Jun 2, 2026

Enhancing Operational Safety via Agentic Dialogue Hazard Identification Analysis

Operational safety in high-stakes domains such as industrial process control, autonomous, and safety-critical systems, demand reliable hazard identification. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating safety analysis tasks, single-turn, monolithic inference is brittle: it lacks the self-correction, deliberation, and contextual refinement that safety engineers apply iteratively. In this paper, we introduce HAZDIAL, a framework that investigates whether structured agentic dialogue-multi-agent, multi-turn interactions improves the quality of NLP- based hazard identification over single-pass baselines. We systematically compare two dialogue modalities: adversarial debate and constructive discussion, and propose an algorithm-based agentic interaction optimization. We evaluate all configurations against a curated golden dataset using standard classification metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, F1) and novel dialogue metrics. This work advances the intersection of dialogue systems, multi-agent reasoning, and AI safety, providing an empirical evidence for dialogue-driven hazard analysis.
Jun 2, 2026

ViMax: Agentic Video Generation

Long-form video generation requires systematic narrative planning and visual consistency that current short-clip methods cannot provide. Existing methods generate isolated sequences without narrative structure and lack mechanisms for maintaining character and environmental consistency across scenes. We present ViMax, an agentic video generation framework that addresses video creation through coordinated multi-agent collaboration where specialized components negotiate narrative decisions, visual continuity, and production quality. Our framework employs a hierarchical narrative engine with retrieval-augmented generation for global story coherence and a dependency-aware visual consistency mechanism that tracks character and environmental states across temporal boundaries, while VLM-guided agents continuously monitor and refine both narrative coherence and visual fidelity. The framework enables coordinated agent collaboration to generate extended narrative content. This maintains both storytelling integrity and visual coherence across multi-scene timelines.
Jun 2, 2026

SAGE: A Quantitative Evaluation of Socialized Evolution in Agent Ecosystems

Self-improving language agents are typically evaluated in isolation: an agent attempts a task, receives feedback, and iteratively refines its own behavior. Yet agents increasingly operate alongside peers whose strategies and outcomes are publicly visible. This raises an under-studied question: when does shared experience produce improvements that self-improvement alone cannot achieve? We introduce SAGE (Social Agent Group Evolution),an evaluation framework that compares two compute-matched conditions: SocialEvo, where agents from five distinct model families co-evolve with access to all peers' histories; and SelfEvo, where each agent receives the same number of task attempts but sees only its own past, which is conventional in self-improving agent studies. We instantiate SAGE in three arenas: open-ended ML research, long-horizon economic planning, and strategic multiplayer play, evaluated across multiple evolutionary rounds. We find that group history is not a universal amplifier: the strongest agent does not exceed its self-evolution ceiling. However, agents that plateau under self-improvement can achieve significant breakthroughs when peer experience is available. In competitive settings, counterfactual controls reveal that agents improve generally rather than developing opponent-specific strategies. Across different forms of shared history, filtered peer traces and reflective summaries often outperform raw logs, indicating that social gains depend on abstraction rather than exposure volume. These findings reveal that peer-history gains are agent-specific, arena-dependent, and contingent on the capacity to abstract transferable knowledge from public traces.
Jun 2, 2026

Think-Before-Speak: From Internal Evaluation to Public Expression in Multi-Agent Social Simulation

LLM-based multi-agent simulation offers a promising way to study social interaction, deliberation, and collective opinion dynamics. However, many existing dialogue simulation frameworks represent interaction mainly as observable turn exchange or aggregated outputs, leaving the internal evaluative processes behind silence, speaking intention, and public expression difficult to examine. We introduce TBS (Think-Before-Speak), an interval-based multi-agent simulation framework that separates agents' private reasoning from public utterance generation. At each interval, all agents update structured internal states based on the shared dialogue history and their own memory. These states include dissonance-related appraisal, perceived opinion climate, perceived isolation risk, response strategy, and willingness to speak. The orchestrator then resolves competing speaking intentions and commits one utterance to the public dialogue, allowing internal evaluation and public interaction to co-evolve over time. We evaluate TBS in simulated town hall discussions on a climate-related policy issue. Results show that TBS produces coherent internal-state traces and that these traces vary systematically across turn-allocation, silence, and memory conditions. Dissonance-related appraisal increases agents' willingness to speak, whereas silence-pressure appraisal decreases it. Once speaking intention is formed, public expression is shaped mainly by turn-allocation rules. These findings suggest that TBS supports mechanism-sensitive social simulation by making the pathway from internal evaluation to public expression observable and analyzable.
Jun 2, 2026

AUDITFLOW: Executable Symbolic Environments for Structured Financial Reporting Verification

Structured financial reporting verification requires connecting reported facts to accounting constraints, reconstructing expected values, and executing numerical checks. We study this problem through XBRL numerical consistency verification and introduce AuditFlow, a graph-grounded multi-agent framework built around an executable symbolic environment. The environment links a reusable US-GAAP taxonomy graph with filing-specific XBRL evidence and provides typed tools for retrieval, traversal, computation, and rule evaluation. Two specialized auditors investigate constraints and filing evidence, while a senior auditor coordinates disagreement-triggered refinement. Deterministic tools produce verification evidence; evidential aggregation combines structured reports, including agent-declared overrides, into final decisions. On a newly collected 1{,}000-instance evaluation set of engine-recorded DQC violations, AuditFlow achieves 87.70%87.70\% joint audit accuracy with Claude Sonnet 4.6, compared with 68.60%68.60\% for Single Agent and 86.70%86.70\% for Checker-only. Component and coverage analyses identify executable verification as the main source of accuracy, while additional gains from agent judgment depend on the backbone and checker coverage.
Jun 1, 2026

POIROT: Interrogating Agents for Failure Detection in Multi-Agent Systems

Orchestrating Large Language Models into Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) has unlocked remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet emergent failures and hallucinations that resist characterisation block their deployment in safety-critical domains -- a gap made legally untenable by emerging AI regulation. Existing evaluation paradigms share a common flaw: centralised judgment creates single points of failure and demands domain-specific expertise. Here we present POIROT, a protocol that repurposes a system's own agents as its diagnostic layer, leveraging the epistemic diversity already present in the architecture. Across evaluated settings, POIROT outperforms single-LLM evaluator baselines, with gains that scale with problem complexity (OR = 1.60, p=0.008p = 0.008), agent count, and fault dimensionality, persisting under compound fault conditions. These results demonstrate that safety oversight need not be externalised: the agents executing a role carry sufficient collective intelligence to audit it. We release POIROT as an open-source library alongside BLAME, a benchmark for fault attribution in safety-critical multi-agent systems.
Jun 1, 2026

Post-Deterministic Distributed Systems: A New Foundation for Trustworthy Autonomous Infrastructure

For decades, distributed systems have typically assumed that correct participants execute protocol-specified behavior with stable, externally defined, and deterministic semantics. Classical theory has extensively parameterized network timing, communication topologies, and failure domains, but this participant model has remained comparatively fixed. The integration of autonomous reasoning engines, stochastic model-driven agents, and policy-driven actors into cloud control planes, incident response systems, and financial infrastructure challenges the universality of this assumption. These agents often produce divergent reasoning paths, distinct operational traces, and heterogeneous internal representations while achieving semantically equivalent and correct outcomes. In this paper, we introduce Post-Deterministic Distributed Systems (PDDS) as a research and engineering model for coordinating heterogeneous environments where deterministic code, stochastic models, and autonomous agents coexist. We show that classical distributed computing models form a zero-ambiguity special case of this participant-general model. We do not argue that deterministic systems disappear; rather, deterministic execution can no longer serve as the universal participant assumption for autonomous infrastructure. Finally, we outline five architectural pillars of post-deterministic infrastructure: Protocol-Driven Development, Verifiable Agentic Infrastructure, Autonomous State Control Planes, Semantic Quorum Assurance, and Epistemic State Replication. Epistemic State Replication extends persistence and consistency models from data visibility to knowledge visibility, enabling agentic memory, Verifiable Semantic Rollback, and coherence across reasoning participants. We also define a taxonomy of failure classes that arise in this setting.
Jun 1, 2026

A Sheaf Framework for Strategic Multi-Agent Systems: From Consensus to Nash Equilibria

The coordination of heterogeneous autonomous agents in dynamic, adversarial environments requires simultaneous satisfaction of geometric constraints, logical consistency, temporal reasoning, and strategic optimization. Existing sheaf- and topos-theoretic frameworks provide powerful tools for geometric consensus, knowledge alignment, and causal planning, but lack explicit models for value, reward, and strategic choice. This report presents a unified categorical framework that integrates event calculus, SCEL-like ensemble formation, and game-theoretic reward structures into a single Grothendieck topos of time-space histories. We introduce the notion of a game sheaf whose stalks contain utility functions and policy distributions, and restriction maps encode both parallel transport and best-response dynamics. We prove that Nash equilibria correspond to global sections of a derived best-response correspondence sheaf, while cohomological obstructions classify failures of strategic consistency. A detailed case study of an immunological ``bastion defense'' scenario -- heterogeneous agents forming attack/defense ensembles under resource constraints -- demonstrates the framework's expressiveness. This synthesis provides a rigorous foundation for verifiable, autonomic, and economically rational multi-agent systems.
May 31, 2026

When Parallelism Pays Off: Cohesion-Aware Task Partitioning for Multi-Agent Coding

Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems offer a way to decompose complex tasks, such as coding, through parallelization and context isolation. However, adding agents in practice introduces inter-agent communication overhead, which incurs extra cost and can sometimes offset the efficiency gains. We formalize multi-agent orchestration as a graph partitioning problem that captures the communication-to-computation trade-off: task decomposition can shorten critical-path computation, but cross-agent dependencies require costly context transfer. We instantiate this view in repository-level software engineering and present Cohesion-aware Coder (Co-Coder), which builds dependency graphs from static analysis, isolates structural hub files, partitions the graph via community detection, and executes the partition with a dependency-aware scheduler. Across 28 real-world tasks on DevEval and CodeProjectEval, Co-Coder advances the Pareto-frontier over sequential and file-based parallel baselines as well as Claude Code with Agent Teams, lifting pass rate by up to 14.0%, achieving up to a 2.10x wall-clock speedup, and reducing API cost by up to 35%, with the largest gains on the most dependency-dense projects. Co-coder demonstrates how cohesion-aware orchestration can make parallel coding agents both theoretically grounded and practically efficient, suggesting a broader design principle for multi-agent systems.
May 30, 2026

Scaling Behavior of Single LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Systems

The burgeoning field of LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) promises to tackle complex tasks through collaborative intelligence, yet fundamental questions regarding their scaling behavior and intrinsic collective dynamics remain underexplored. This paper systematically investigates how the performance of a homogeneous MAS evolves as the number of agents increases, isolating the variable of collaboration from model or knowledge heterogeneity. We propose the Sequential Iterative Multi-Agent System (SIMAS) framework, a minimalist architecture centered on sequential inter-agent communication, to clearly observe scaling effects. Through extensive experiments across diverse tasks and model scales, we establish that MAS performance does not scale monotonically with agent count but follows a pattern of diminishing returns, governed by a trade-off between collaborative synergy and coordination overhead. Our findings reveal that effective MAS requires a sufficiently capable base LLM, that task type critically modulates the optimal agent count, and that collective intelligence is an emergent property contingent on strategic interaction design rather than a guaranteed outcome of agent plurality. The performance degradation stems coordination overhead rather than merely long-context failure, and the scaling tendency generalizes across interaction architectures like structured debate topologies. This work provides a foundational understanding of MAS scaling laws, offering practical guidance for designing efficient collaborative systems and challenging the prevailing assumption that more agents invariably lead to better performance.
May 29, 2026

Leveraging the Learning Curve: Reusing Existing Architectural Patterns to Design and Implement MAS

Recent advancements in AI have led to the development of specialized systems related to multi-agent systems (MAS). However, the inherently collaborative nature of agents is often overlooked, and many of these specialized systems are used as components by other AI systems. From a software engineering perspective, this context can benefit from aligning the architectural characteristics of distributed systems with the inherently distributed nature of MAS. We propose that introducing a minimal set of agent-related concepts into the Distributed Systems (DS) domain can improve the engineering of modern MAS by leveraging techniques from DS engineering with established agent theory. In this study, we recapitulated the common origins of MAS and DS by drawing architectural parallels to establish a unified engineering approach. We then defined a minimal set of agent concepts to perform two practical studies on leveraging MAS development. First, we incorporated these concepts into a DS architectural pattern to design a distributed MAS. We then used these concepts in a graduate course to teach MAS engineering to students with no prior knowledge of agent theory. The learning outcomes from both courses included successful MAS implementation using DS tools and techniques. Although more than two-thirds of these students had no practical experience in developing distributed systems, the average final grade in both courses was above 80%, thus validating our approach. Finally, we discuss how this study supports the development of advanced systems using modern AI techniques consistently with established agent-related research while leveraging established DS techniques and concepts.
May 29, 2026

Diagnosing Failure Modes of Shared-State Collaboration in Resource-Constrained Visual Agents

Modular visual reasoning systems increasingly rely on shared working memory for multi-step collaboration, yet the failure dynamics of intermediate state evolution in low-capacity regimes remain underexplored. We study failure modes of collaborative reasoning with weak learners (4B--8B models) through the lens of noise accumulation. We introduce CoSee, an auditing framework that formalizes the read-write-verify loop to trace information flow in document visual question answering. Across multi-page, chart, and web-based benchmarks, we find a counter-intuitive degradation: naive shared workspaces often amplify hallucinations rather than resolve them. We identify two dominant failure modes: Noise Reinforcement, where ungrounded notes are reused as evidence, and Policy Collapse, where added context shifts the model toward under-specified, short-form answers. Using cost-accuracy Pareto frontiers, we show that increased compute can correlate negatively with performance without explicit verification. Our findings suggest that for resource-constrained agents, the bottleneck lies not in reasoning depth but in communication fidelity, providing trace-level diagnostics and a mechanistic baseline for reliable modular design.
May 28, 2026

Unifying Temporal and Structural Credit Assignment in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Prompt Optimization

While Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) empower Large Language Models to tackle complex reasoning tasks through collaborative interaction, optimizing their dynamics remains a formidable challenge due to the discrete, non-differentiable nature of the computation graph and the sparsity of global supervisory signals. Existing black-box optimizers struggle to attribute trajectory-level failure to specific local components, resulting in inefficient, high-variance exploration. We argue that tractable MAS optimization needs structural inductive biases to disentangle error signals. We propose temporal and structural credit assignment, which decomposes the objective along two axes: (i) temporal credit, using state-space bottlenecks to identify critical rounds, and (ii) structural credit, using stationary role policies to isolate agent contributions. Leveraging these decomposed signals, we introduce a discrete, verbalized block coordinate descent algorithm for iterative refinement. Rather than indiscriminate global updates, it alternates between optimizing role prompts and aggregation protocols, using LLM-generated "proxy gradients" to target only the identified weak links. Across diverse reasoning benchmarks, our approach substantially reduces query complexity while improving performance, providing a principled and interpretable path toward self-improving MAS.
May 28, 2026

Delayed Repression and Emergent Instability in Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems

Regulatory institutions (from content moderation platforms to financial supervisors) observe, deliberate, and intervene only after a characteristic delay. We ask whether this processing lag alone can destabilize a multi-agent system that would otherwise remain stable, without exogenous shocks, coordination among agents, or malicious actors. We study this in two stages. First, we analyze a delayed replicator equation in which autonomous agents benefit from radical behavior but face punishment based on a lagged institutional alarm signal. We derive a closed-form critical delay beyond which the unique interior equilibrium loses stability through a Hopf bifurcation, and prove via center manifold reduction that the bifurcation is supercritical (bounded oscillations, not explosive growth) for the entire sigmoid response family. Second, we embed N=240 agents on a network with reinforcement learning (tabular Q-learning) and cross institutional delay with three decision architectures: fixed-policy, reactive (a memoryless threshold heuristic), and Q-learning. The hierarchy is opposite to the naive expectation that learning amplifies instability. Reactive agents are perfectly stable without delay yet collapse once delay is introduced (96% runaway by delay >= 8); fixed-policy agents are immune (0% at all delays); Q-learning agents are only partially resilient (66% at delay 20). The destabilizing ingredient is reactivity to delayed signals, not learning: agents that immediately exploit low-alarm windows trigger oscillatory feedback loops, while learning buffers this through punishment memory encoded in value functions. Throughout, "runaway" denotes bounded large-amplitude oscillation crossing a radical-fraction threshold, consistent with the supercritical bifurcation, not unbounded growth.
May 28, 2026

Evolve as a Team: Collaborative Self-Evolution for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as an effective paradigm for complex and long-horizon tasks. However, in real-world tasks, MAS often exhibit various failures during execution and such failures are difficult to eliminate during design. This motivates experience-driven MAS evolution, where a system improves based on its own execution experience. Yet such evolution is challenging because MAS experience is prolonged and intricate, interleaving multiple agents' execution chains and communication messages, which makes it difficult to identify what should be improved. To address this challenge, we propose Meta-Team, an experience-driven MAS evolution framework based on collaborative self-evolution. Meta-Team preserves the execution context of each agent and coordinates post-task communication, enabling agents to exchange distributed evidence for evolution. Building on this design, Meta-Team conducts multi-scale self-evolution, transforming execution experience into reusable improvements to agent behaviors, inter-agent coordination, and team-level organization. Across six long-horizon agent benchmarks, Meta-Team consistently outperforms single-agent systems, hand-crafted MAS, and prior MAS evolution methods; further analyses demonstrate that Meta-Team enables more reliable and scalable MAS self-evolution.
May 28, 2026

Distributed Non-Uniform Scaling Control of Multi-Agent Formation with Dynamic Agent Joining

Non-uniform scaling control of formation enables multi-agent systems to adjust their shape by scaling with different ratios along different coordinate axes, offering enhanced flexibility in complex environments. However, like most existing formation maneuver strategies, it typically assumes a fixed set of agents, limiting its applicability in scenarios requiring dynamic team expansion. This paper introduces a distributed control framework that enables a formation to incorporate new agents during non-uniform scaling maneuvers in arbitrary dimensions while preserving the spectral properties of the graph Laplacian. Simulation examples validate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.
May 27, 2026

The Best-Laid SCHEMEs: Coordinated Sabotage and Monitoring in Multi-Agent Systems

As agentic coding systems decompose work across multiple model instances, a critical safety question is whether those instances can coordinate to achieve a hidden malicious objective while remaining aligned with user intent. We introduce SCHEME, a benchmark of 17 task instances across 7 settings and 8 real open-source libraries, each pairing a legitimate software-engineering task with a covert side task. Every setting is designed so that no proper subset of agents can succeed alone: agents must decompose a shared sabotage plan, relay partial requirements under different communication topologies, and execute mutually consistent edits, testing genuine multi-agent coordination rather than individual capability. Evaluating with GPT 5.1 Codex and Gemini 3.1 Pro, we find coordinated sabotage is already practical, with Gemini completing the covert objective while succeeding on the legitimate task in 84% of samples and Codex in 46%. A failure analysis shows that recovery, not failure incidence, drives the model gap: both models suffer similar numbers of communication failures per trajectory, but Gemini recovers from ∼\sim73% of occurrences against Codex's ∼\sim56%. However, the agents' code edits remain detectable: a trusted monitor flags coordinated sabotage at FPR≤\le2% in 99%/68% (Gemini/Codex) of attempts from code edits alone, rising to 100%/81% with access to agent communication. Despite stealth-aware prompting, undetected sabotage stays at <<3% under the full-visibility monitor; telling agents a monitor is present halves Gemini's sabotage success without significantly breaking detection, even when agents are explicitly prompted to fabricate cover stories.
May 27, 2026

Bosses, Kings, and the Commons: Cooperation Under Power Asymmetry in LLM Societies

Communities can sustainably manage shared resources (commons) through self-governance and cooperative norms, a central finding of Ostrom's theory of self-governance. However, real-world commons (e.g., fisheries, forests, and irrigation systems) are often governed under asymmetric power structures, where certain individuals or institutions possess disproportionate control over resource extraction and collective outcomes. As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as agents in synthetic governance simulations, understanding how LLM societies behave under asymmetric power structures is becoming increasingly important, yet existing evaluations largely ignore such asymmetries. We introduce Sovereignty over the Commons Simulation (SovSim), a generative multi-agent simulation framework that incorporates an agent with asymmetric power (boss or king) into a society of symmetric agents (workers or peasants), where all agents extract from a shared resource, collectively determining its sustainability over time. Across eleven state-of-the-art models, we find that introducing asymmetric power leads to severe breakdowns in cooperation and sustainability, with up to an 87.3% degradation in survival rate relative to symmetric settings.
May 27, 2026

AutoScientists: Self-Organizing Agent Teams for Long-Running Scientific Experimentation

Scientific research proceeds through iterative cycles of hypothesis generation, experiment design, execution, and revision. AI agents can automate parts of this process, but existing approaches typically follow a single research trajectory or coordinate through a central planner with fixed objectives. As a result, they struggle to sustain parallel exploration, adapt as experimental evidence changes, or preserve knowledge of failed directions over long-running experiments. We introduce AutoScientists, a decentralized team of AI agents for long-running computational scientific experimentation. Agents interpret a shared experimental state, self-organize into teams around promising hypotheses, critique proposals before using experimental compute, and share successes and failures to reduce redundant exploration. Under matched experimental budgets, AutoScientists improves over prior AI agents across biomedical machine learning, language-model training optimization, and protein fitness prediction. On BioML-Bench, spanning biomedical imaging, protein engineering, single-cell omics, and drug discovery, AutoScientists achieves a mean leaderboard percentile of 74.4% across 24 tasks, improving over the strongest AI agent by +8.33%. On GPT training optimization, AutoScientists reaches a target validation bits-per-byte 1.9x faster than Autoresearch and continues discovering improvements from a starting champion where the single-agent approach finds none (7 vs. 0 accepted improvements). On ProteinGym fitness prediction, AutoScientists discovers a method for ACE2-Spike binding that improves over the current state-of-the-art model by +12.5% in Spearman correlation. Applied without modification across all 217 ProteinGym assays, the same method improves over the prior state of the art by +6.5% (Spearman correlation).
May 27, 2026

Roles with Rails: Contract-Preserving Role Evolution in Multi-Agent Structured Reasoning

Role-based LLM multi-agent systems need adaptive role pools, yet adapting such systems is not merely a matter of prompt optimization: roles often carry structural obligations, including capability coverage, message compatibility, validation, final-answer aggregation, and parser-compatible output protocols. Existing systems either fix the role inventory and lose adaptivity, or allow unconstrained generation to induce role drift, removing structurally necessary roles and breaking answer contracts. We formulate this as contract-preserving role evolution, requiring every committed edit to preserve five structural contracts (capability, communication, validation, aggregation, output protocol). We instantiate this formulation in SERO, a Self-Evolving Role Orchestration framework that evolves a typed role-card pool through credit-guided retrieval, a credit-ranked communication DAG with a protected terminal aggregator and conditional validator repair, and a contextual-bandit controller whose LLM-proposed edits are committed only when they preserve the contracts and improve task score. Experiments on real-world reasoning benchmarks across three LLM backbones confirm the value of contract-preserving role evolution.