SkillGraph: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Collaboration with Multimodal Graph Topology

arXiv cs.AI / 4/21/2026

📰 NewsModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper argues that scaling vision-language models into Visual Multiagent Systems (VMAS) is limited by fixed communication topologies and agent reasoning abilities that do not adapt during deployment.
  • It introduces SkillGraph, a joint framework that evolves both agents’ skills and the collaboration graph topology in a query- and content-aware way.
  • SkillGraph uses a Multimodal Graph Transformer (MMGT) to encode visual tokens, instruction semantics, and active skill embeddings, then predict a collaboration graph conditioned on the current query.
  • It adds a Skill Designer that distills and refines reasoning heuristics from failure cases to build a self-evolving multimodal Skill Bank, with updated skill embeddings fed back into the MMGT to keep topology and capability co-adapting.
  • Experiments reportedly show consistent gains across four benchmarks, multiple MAS structures, and several base models, with code released on GitHub.

Abstract

Scaling vision-language models into Visual Multiagent Systems (VMAS) is hindered by two coupled issues. First, communication topologies are fixed before inference, leaving them blind to visual content and query context; second, agent reasoning abilities remain static during deployment. These issues reinforce each other: a rigid topology fails to leverage richer agent expertise, while static agents lack incentives to specialize for a given query. We address this with SkillGraph, a joint framework that evolves both agent expertise and communication topology. Within this framework, a Multimodal Graph Transformer (MMGT) encodes visual tokens, instruction semantics and active skill embeddings to predict a query-conditioned collaboration graph, replacing hand-crafted routing with dynamic, content-aware information flow. Complementing this, a Skill Designer distills and refines reasoning heuristics from failure cases, constructing a self-evolving multimodal Skill Bank. Crucially, updated skill embeddings are fed back into the MMGT, enabling the topology to adapt alongside capability growth. Experiments show that SkillGraph achieves consistent improvements across four benchmarks, five common MAS structures and four base models. Code is available at https://github.com/niez233/skillgraph.