Revisiting Gossip Protocols: A Vision for Emergent Coordination in Agentic Multi-Agent Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Habiba, Mansura, Khan, Nafiul I.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Habiba, Mansura
Khan, Nafiul I.
author_facet Habiba, Mansura
Khan, Nafiul I.
contents As agentic platforms scale, agents are evolving beyond static roles and fixed toolchains, creating a growing need for flexible, decentralized coordination. Today's structured communication protocols (e.g., direct agent-to-agent messaging) excel at reliability and task delegation, but they fall short in enabling emergent, swarm-like intelligence, where distributed agents continuously learn, adapt, and communicate to form collective cognition. This paper revisits gossip protocols, long valued in distributed systems for their fault tolerance and decentralization, and argues that they offer a missing layer for context-rich, adaptive communication in agentic AI. Gossip enables scalable, low-overhead dissemination of shared knowledge, but also raises unresolved challenges around semantic filtering, staleness, trustworthiness, and consistency in high-stakes environments. Rather than proposing a new framework, this work charts a research agenda for integrating gossip as a complementary substrate alongside structured protocols. We identify critical gaps in current agent-to-agent architectures, highlight where gossip could reshape assumptions about coordination, and outline open questions around intent propagation, knowledge decay, and peer-to-peer trust. Gossip is not a silver bullet, but overlooking it risks missing a key path toward resilient, reflexive, and self-organizing multi-agent systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01531
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Gossip Protocols: A Vision for Emergent Coordination in Agentic Multi-Agent Systems
Habiba, Mansura
Khan, Nafiul I.
Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
As agentic platforms scale, agents are evolving beyond static roles and fixed toolchains, creating a growing need for flexible, decentralized coordination. Today's structured communication protocols (e.g., direct agent-to-agent messaging) excel at reliability and task delegation, but they fall short in enabling emergent, swarm-like intelligence, where distributed agents continuously learn, adapt, and communicate to form collective cognition. This paper revisits gossip protocols, long valued in distributed systems for their fault tolerance and decentralization, and argues that they offer a missing layer for context-rich, adaptive communication in agentic AI. Gossip enables scalable, low-overhead dissemination of shared knowledge, but also raises unresolved challenges around semantic filtering, staleness, trustworthiness, and consistency in high-stakes environments. Rather than proposing a new framework, this work charts a research agenda for integrating gossip as a complementary substrate alongside structured protocols. We identify critical gaps in current agent-to-agent architectures, highlight where gossip could reshape assumptions about coordination, and outline open questions around intent propagation, knowledge decay, and peer-to-peer trust. Gossip is not a silver bullet, but overlooking it risks missing a key path toward resilient, reflexive, and self-organizing multi-agent systems.
title Revisiting Gossip Protocols: A Vision for Emergent Coordination in Agentic Multi-Agent Systems
topic Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01531