English

Recursive Multi-Agent Systems

Artificial Intelligence 2026-04-29 v1 Computation and Language Machine Learning

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.25917,
  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},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.25917},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

36 Pages. Project Website: https://recursivemas.github.io