Multi-Agent Systems

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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.

HiMA-MDD: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Harness for Interpretable Multimodal Depression Detection in Clinical Interviews
Aug 22, 2026Ao Chen, Xiaojiang PengDepression Detection Depression Severity Estimation
School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen Technology University
An Evidence-Grounded Multi-Agent System for High-Level Bio-Robot Design
Aug 20, 2026Yujun Chen, Tianle Li, Jiayu Chen +1Robotics Multi-Agent Systems
What Confidence Routing Is Actually Doing: Auditing Routing, Calibration, and Commitment in Multi-Agent Deliberation
Aug 18, 2026Jingyan Jiang, Huihuo Zheng, Rajeev Thakur +1Multi-Agent Deliberation LLM Agent Routing
Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL 60439, USA
Multi-Agent AI System for Radiology Report Structuring and Quality Assurance with Independent Radiologist Evaluation
Aug 18, 2026Iryna Hartsock, Cesar Lam, Christopher Otteni +4Radiology Report Evaluation Multi-Agent Systems
Department of Machine Learning, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, Tampa, FL, USA · Department of Diagnostic Imaging and Interventional Radiology, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, Tampa, FL, USA · Department of Neuro-Oncology, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, Tampa, FL, USA +1
The Curious Case of Exploding DecPOMDPs: Containing the Fire through Policy Counting
Aug 18, 2026Nazlı Nur Karabulut, Tanya BraunPartially Observable Markov Decision Processes Multi-Agent Systems
Computer Science Department, University of Münster, Münster, Germany
Adversarial Review: Structured Disagreement for Grounded Agentic Code Review
Aug 16, 2026Eric S. Qiu, Joyce GillAutomated Code Review Multi-Agent Coding
Cornell University · Stanford University
ETHOS: Towards a Modular Ethics Framework for Clinical Multi-Agent Systems
Aug 15, 2026Rakesh Sharma, Sydney Pugh, Cameron Beeche +14AI Agent Safety AI Agent Monitoring
Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA · Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA · Department of Medicine, Division of Translational Medicine and Human Genetics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA +6
LLMs Can Predict Failure Risk, But Struggle to Predict Which Collaboration Protocol Pays Off: Cost-Aware Protocol Routing Across Reasoning Tasks
Aug 14, 2026Chih-Hsuan Yang, Jingyan Jiang, Cheng-Hau Yang +4LLM Agent Routing Efficient Language Model Reasoning
Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA · Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA
Emergent Misaligned Communication in Long-Horizon Multi-Agent LLM Commerce
Aug 14, 2026Zeyuan Li, Lukas Petersson, Alessandro Acquisti +1Emergent Misalignment in Language Models LLM Agent Safety
Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Andon Labs
Submodular Policy Learning for Distributed Task Allocation in Open Multi-Agent Systems
Aug 14, 2026Jing Liu, Luca Ballotta, Yangyang Yang +3Multi-Agent Systems Policy Learning
School of Mathematics, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China · Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, 35131 Padova, Italy · School of Mathematics and the Key Laboratory of Smart Manufacturing in Energy Chemical Process, Ministry of Education, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China
BoardroomAI: Dependency-Aware Human-Steerable Multi-Agent Deliberation through Evolving Decision Graphs
Aug 13, 2026Sanjeev ManivannanHuman-in-the-Loop AI Multi-Agent Systems
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India
OGR-MARL: Option-Guided Residual Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneous USV Cooperative Pursuit in Constrained Port Waterways
Aug 13, 2026Jiayang Mao, Lanfeng Wang, Zhao-Han PengReinforcement Learning Mobile Robotics
Entropy-Augmented Multi-Objective Policy Optimization in Multiagent Systems
Aug 12, 2026Jamie Santos, Ayhan Alp Aydeniz, Raghav Thakar +1Multi-Agent Coordination Multi-Robot Systems
The Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA
Multi-AUV Ad-hoc network-based Target Tracking: A Value Gradient Guidance Multi-Agent Diffusion Reinforcement Learning Approach
Aug 12, 2026Jiaao Ma, Chuan Lin, Guangjie Han +4Multi-Agent Control Diffusion Policy
Software College, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China · Key Laboratory of Maritime Intelligent Network Information Technology, Ministry of Education, Hohai University, Changzhou, China · College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, 210013, China
From Extraction to Governed Memory: Multi-Agent Knowledge Graph Construction with Domain-Expert Review
Aug 12, 2026Pranav Bykampadi, Neel Mokaria, Vishesh Narayan +2Knowledge Graphs KG Construction
University of Maryland
When Do Institutions Beat Intelligence?
Aug 11, 2026Zhengye HanMulti-Agent Systems Multi-Agent Reasoning
New York University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Brooklyn, New York, United States
Who Are You Explaining To? A Multi-Agent System for Audience-Aware XAI Narratives
Aug 11, 2026Francesco Musicco, Danilo Danese, Giuseppe Fasano +3Multi-Agent Systems Explainability Evaluation
Politecnico di Bari, Italy
ASCon: A Direction-Aware Reciprocal Agent--Step Contextualization Model for Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems
Aug 11, 2026Shuyu Jiang, Yue Ran, Kaiyu Xu +5Agent Failure Analysis Multi-Agent LLM Systems
1Sichuan University, China · 2Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Co-Evolution in Agentic Systems: Toward Self-Directed Evolution Beyond Human Design
Aug 10, 2026Qing Zong, Jiayu Liu, Junhao Shen +9Multi-Agent Systems Self-Evolving Agents
1Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · 3The Chinese University of Hong Kong +2
Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
Aug 10, 2026Vassilis Papadopoulos, McNair Shah, Sam Zimmerman +1Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Systems
1Anthropic Fellows Program · 2EPFL · 3Anthropic
Multi-Agent AI Safety as an Institutional Design Problem
Aug 10, 2026Abdullah XAI Agent Safety Multi-Agent Systems
POLIS Research Programme, Project AWARE
NeuroRefiner: Morphology-Aware Multi-Agent Refinement for 3D Fluorescence Microscopy Neuron Segmentation
Aug 10, 2026Haiyang Yan, Jinyue Guo, Yanchao Zhang +6Topology-Preserving Image Segmentation Fluorescence Microscopy
State Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences +1
Distributed Team Orchestration via Supervisor Networks: Convergence, Optimality, and Resilience
Aug 10, 2026Juntian Zhu, Guanpu Chen, Tongtian Zhu +3Multi-Agent Orchestration Zero-Sum Games
School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China · School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China · College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China +2
Population-Scalable Multi-Agent World Modeling
Aug 9, 2026Renjie Zhao, Yuxiang Wu, Mingyu Zhang +7World Model Learning Multi-Agent Systems
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
IntelliAudit: Using Large Language Models to Evaluate Audit Controls
Aug 7, 2026Allison Wilson, Sina Moradi Sabet, Diar Shakimov +4AI Assurance Multi-Agent Systems
Simon Fraser University Burnaby, Canada · Amirkabir University of Technology Tehran, Iran · TELUS Vancouver, Canada +1
Interaction Creates Dynamical AI Behavior Absent in Isolation
Aug 7, 2026Bella Xinrui Li, Frank Yingjie Huo, Neil F JohnsonDynamical Systems Multi-Agent Systems
1Physics Department, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA
Tracing the Heart: An Evidence-Linked Pipeline for Heart-Failure Feature Engineering
Aug 6, 2026Soorya Ram Shimgekar, Michelle Hu, Dorisa Shehi +10Multi-Agent Systems Electronic Health Records
Nimblemind · Singapore University of Technology and Design · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign +4
Computationally Efficient Collaborative Communication Via Regularity-Based Coarsening
Aug 5, 2026Mark Bedaywi, Scott Emmons, Nika Haghtalab +1Agent Communication Protocols Multi-Agent Systems
University of California, Berkeley
Responsibility in Multi-Agent Sequential Decision-Making: Comparing Human Judgments to Formal Models of Causal Attribution
Aug 5, 2026Nripsuta Ani Saxena, Stelios Triantafyllou, Goran RadanovićActual Causality Multi-Agent Systems
University of Southern California Los Angeles, California, USA · Max Planck Institute for Software Systems Saarbrücken, Germany
History Matters: Meta-policy Delegation with Heterogeneous Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Aug 4, 2026Ziqing Lu, Avinash Reddy Mudireddy, Sarra Alqahtani +1Multi-Agent Systems Cooperative MARL
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Iowa · Department of Computer Science Wake Forest University

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HiMA-MDD: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Harness for Interpretable Multimodal Depression Detection in Clinical Interviews

Ao Chen, Xiaojiang Peng

School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen Technology University

Depression Detection Depression Severity Estimation LLM Agent Harnesses Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Systems Multimodal Model Interpretability

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Depression assessment from multimodal clinical interviews requires integrating dispersed evidence from multiple symptoms into a coherent PHQ-8 profile. This process is hierarchical: relevant evidence is often sparse and context-dependent within local question-answer exchanges, multiple exchanges jointly support symptom-level judgments, and the final assessment depends on the coherence of the complete symptom profile. Existing LLM systems either process interviews holistically or distribute work across generic agent roles; neither design necessarily provides an explicit orchestration mechanism that coordinates evidence access, item-score authority, bounded feedback, and state recording across these levels. To address this gap, we introduce HiMA-MDD, a hierarchical multi-agent harness that aligns this assessment hierarchy with three agent layers. After non-agentic preprocessing constructs context-preserving multimodal QA units, Layer 1 identifies candidate QA-to-item relations and supports bounded item-grounded evidence routing. Layer 2 assigns symptom groups to operational factor specialists, with one specialist responsible for each provisional item score. Layer 3 audits the complete provisional profile, requests at most one round of targeted revision, and reconstructs the verified PHQ-8 profile. This layered design naturally yields a Hierarchical Evidence Trace, preserves all intermediate evidence, judgments, and revisions for auditability. The final item scores then deterministically produce the total score and screening decision. Using Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct as the harness backbone, our experiments on E-DAIC demonstrate that HiMA-MDD outperforms the compared state-of-the-art methods.