Paper Detail

Recursive Agent Optimization

Apurva Gandhi, Satyaki Chakraborty, Xiangjun Wang, Aviral Kumar, Graham Neubig

arxiv Score 11.8

Published 2026-05-07 · First seen 2026-05-09

General AI

Abstract

We introduce Recursive Agent Optimization (RAO), a reinforcement learning approach for training recursive agents: agents that can spawn and delegate sub-tasks to new instantiations of themselves recursively. Recursive agents implement an inference-time scaling algorithm that naturally allows agents to scale to longer contexts and generalize to more difficult problems via divide-and-conquer. RAO provides a method to train models to best take advantage of such recursive inference, teaching agents when and how to delegate and communicate. We find that recursive agents trained in this way enjoy better training efficiency, can scale to tasks that go beyond the model's context window, generalize to tasks much harder than the ones the agent was trained on, and can enjoy reduced wall-clock time compared to single-agent systems.

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{gandhi2026recursive,
  title = {Recursive Agent Optimization},
  author = {Apurva Gandhi and Satyaki Chakraborty and Xiangjun Wang and Aviral Kumar and Graham Neubig},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {We introduce Recursive Agent Optimization (RAO), a reinforcement learning approach for training recursive agents: agents that can spawn and delegate sub-tasks to new instantiations of themselves recursively. Recursive agents implement an inference-time scaling algorithm that naturally allows agents to scale to longer contexts and generalize to more difficult problems via divide-and-conquer. RAO provides a method to train models to best take advantage of such recursive inference, teaching agents },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06639},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MA},
  eprint = {2605.06639},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}