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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

Recursive Multi-Agent Systems

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

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 principles 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 agents and recursive computation baselines, RecursiveMAS consistently delivers an average accuracy improvement of 8.3%, 1.2-2.4 end-to-end inference speedup, and 34.6%-75.6% token usage reduction.

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