Recursive Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv cs.CL / 4/29/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper proposes RecursiveMAS, extending recursive (looped) language-model scaling into multi-agent systems by treating the whole agent collaboration as a unified recursive latent-space computation.
  • It introduces RecursiveLink to connect heterogeneous agents via a collaboration loop that supports in-distribution latent-thought generation and cross-agent latent state transfer.
  • The authors develop an inner–outer loop learning algorithm to co-optimize the entire multi-agent system across recursion rounds using shared gradient-based credit assignment.
  • Theoretical analysis and experiments indicate RecursiveMAS is more efficient than standard text-based multi-agent systems, with stable gradients during recursive training.
  • Across 9 benchmarks (math, science, medicine, search, and code), RecursiveMAS achieves an average accuracy gain of 8.3% while improving inference speed by 1.2×–2.4× and reducing token usage by 34.6%–75.6% versus strong baselines, and releases code/data.

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\times-2.4\times end-to-end inference speedup, and 34.6%-75.6% token usage reduction. Code and Data are provided in https://recursivemas.github.io.