Reasoner-Executor-Synthesizer: Scalable Agentic Architecture with Static O(1) Context Window

arXiv cs.AI / 3/25/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces the Reasoner-Executor-Synthesizer (RES) architecture to improve LLM agent deployments that traditionally rely on RAG and therefore suffer from hallucination risk and linear token costs as datasets grow.
  • RES separates the workflow into three layers: a Reasoner for intent parsing, an Executor that performs deterministic retrieval/aggregation using zero LLM tokens, and a Synthesizer that generates narrative output from fixed-size statistical summaries.
  • The authors claim and formally prove RES achieves O(1) token complexity with respect to dataset size by ensuring the LLM context remains fixed-size and never receives raw records.
  • Experiments on ScholarSearch (backed by the Crossref API with 130M+ articles) show mean token cost stays constant (1,574 tokens) across benchmarks even when dataset size varies dramatically.
  • By construction, the approach aims to eliminate data hallucinations because the LLM is prevented from seeing unprocessed raw metadata and only receives aggregated summaries.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed as autonomous agents commonly use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), feeding retrieved documents into the context window, which creates two problems: the risk of hallucination grows with context length, and token cost scales linearly with dataset size. We propose the Reasoner-Executor-Synthesizer (RES) architecture, a three-layer design that strictly separates intent parsing (Reasoner), deterministic data retrieval and aggregation (Executor), and narrative generation (Synthesizer). The Executor uses zero LLM tokens and passes only fixed-size statistical summaries to the Synthesizer. We formally prove that RES achieves O(1) token complexity with respect to dataset size, and validate this on ScholarSearch, a scholarly research assistant backed by the Crossref API (130M+ articles). Across 100 benchmark runs, RES achieves a mean token cost of 1,574 tokens regardless of whether the dataset contains 42,000 or 16.3 million articles. The architecture eliminates data hallucination by construction: the LLM never sees raw records. KEYWORDS LLM agents; agentic architecture; hallucination elimination; token optimization; context window; retrieval-augmented generation; deterministic execution; scholarly metadata; Crossref API; O(1) complexity.