Recursive Multi-Agent Systems
About
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.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mathematical Reasoning | AIME 2025 | Accuracy86.7 | 311 | |
| Medical Question Answering | MedQA | Accuracy79.3 | 124 | |
| Mathematical Problem Solving | MATH500 | Accuracy88.2 | 83 | |
| Scientific Reasoning | GPQA D | Accuracy (%)66.2 | 77 | |
| Mathematical Reasoning | AIME 2026 | AIME 2026 Accuracy86.7 | 55 | |
| Coding | LiveCodeBench | Accuracy42.9 | 38 | |
| Mathematical Problem Solving | AIME 2025 | Accuracy86.7 | 12 | |
| Mathematical Problem Solving | AIME 2026 | Accuracy86 | 12 | |
| Medical Reasoning | MedQA | Accuracy79.3 | 12 | |
| Scientific Reasoning | GPQA D | Accuracy66.2 | 12 |