Paper Detail

Recursive Multi-Agent Systems

Xiyuan Yang, Jiaru Zou, Rui Pan, Ruizhong Qiu, Pan Lu, Shizhe Diao, Jindong Jiang, Hanghang Tong, Tong Zhang, Markus J. Buehler, Jingrui He, James Zou

arxiv Score 16.8

Published 2026-04-28 · First seen 2026-04-29

General AI

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.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
now
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{yang2026recursive,
  title = {Recursive Multi-Agent Systems},
  author = {Xiyuan Yang and Jiaru Zou and Rui Pan and Ruizhong Qiu and Pan Lu and Shizhe Diao and Jindong Jiang and Hanghang Tong and Tong Zhang and Markus J. Buehler and Jingrui He and James Zou},
  year = {2026},
  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 heterogen},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25917},
  keywords = {cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG, recursive language models, multi-agent systems, latent-space recursive computation, RecursiveLink module, inner-outer loop learning, gradient-based credit assignment, runtime complexity, learning dynamics, agent collaboration patterns, end-to-end inference speedup, token usage reduction, code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2604.25917},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}