artificial intelligence

Recursive Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2604.25917

summary

The paper proposes RecursiveMAS, a framework that treats a multi-agent system as a recursive latent‑space computation, enabling agents to iteratively refine each other's thoughts and improve collaborative reasoning.

Abstract

Recursive or looped language models have recently emerged as a new scaling axis by iteratively refining the same model computation over latent states to deepen reasoning. We extend such scaling principle from a single model to multi-agent systems, and ask: Can agent collaboration itself be scaled through recursion? To this end, we introduce RecursiveMAS, a recursive multi-agent framework that casts the entire system as a unified latent-space recursive computation. RecursiveMAS connects heterogeneous agents as a collaboration loop through the lightweight RecursiveLink module, enabling in-distribution latent thoughts generation and cross-agent latent state transfer. To optimize our framework, we develop an inner-outer loop learning algorithm for iterative whole-system co-optimization through shared gradient-based credit assignment across recursion rounds. Theoretical analyses of runtime complexity and learning dynamics establish that RecursiveMAS is more efficient than standard text-based MAS and maintains stable gradients during recursive training. Empirically, we instantiate RecursiveMAS under 4 representative agent collaboration patterns and evaluate across 9 benchmarks spanning mathematics, science, medicine, search, and code generation. In comparison with advanced single/multi-agent and recursive computation baselines, RecursiveMAS consistently delivers an average accuracy improvement of 8.3%, together with 1.2-2.4 end-to-end inference speedup, and 34.6%-75.6% token usage reduction. Code and Data are provided in https://recursivemas.github.io.

Project Website: https://recursivemas.github.io

Topics & keywords

#multi-agent systems#recursive computation#language models#collaborative AI#efficient inferenceRecursiveMASRecursiveLinkinner-outer loop learninggradient-based credit assignmentlatent state transfer