ARM: Discovering Agentic Reasoning Modules for Generalizable Multi-Agent Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Yao, Bohan, Malay, Shiva Krishna Reddy, Yadav, Vikas
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Yao, Bohan
Malay, Shiva Krishna Reddy
Yadav, Vikas
author_facet Yao, Bohan
Malay, Shiva Krishna Reddy
Yadav, Vikas
contents Large Language Model (LLM)-powered Multi-agent systems (MAS) have achieved state-of-the-art results on various complex reasoning tasks. Recent works have proposed techniques to automate the design of MASes, eliminating the need for manual engineering. However, these techniques perform poorly, often achieving similar or inferior performance to simple baselines. Furthermore, they require computationally expensive re-discovery of architectures for each new task domain and expensive data annotation on domains without existing labeled validation sets. A critical insight is that simple Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning often performs competitively with these complex systems, suggesting that the fundamental reasoning unit of MASes, CoT, warrants further investigation. To this end, we present a new paradigm for automatic MAS design that pivots the focus to optimizing CoT reasoning. We introduce the Agentic Reasoning Module (ARM), an agentic generalization of CoT where each granular reasoning step is executed by a specialized reasoning module. This module is discovered through a tree search over the code space, starting from a simple CoT module and evolved using mutations informed by reflection on execution traces. The resulting ARM acts as a versatile reasoning building block which can be utilized as a direct recursive loop or as a subroutine in a learned meta-orchestrator. Our approach significantly outperforms both manually designed MASes and state-of-the-art automatic MAS design methods. Crucially, MASes built with ARM exhibit superb generalization, maintaining high performance across different foundation models and task domains without further optimization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_05746
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ARM: Discovering Agentic Reasoning Modules for Generalizable Multi-Agent Systems
Yao, Bohan
Malay, Shiva Krishna Reddy
Yadav, Vikas
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Large Language Model (LLM)-powered Multi-agent systems (MAS) have achieved state-of-the-art results on various complex reasoning tasks. Recent works have proposed techniques to automate the design of MASes, eliminating the need for manual engineering. However, these techniques perform poorly, often achieving similar or inferior performance to simple baselines. Furthermore, they require computationally expensive re-discovery of architectures for each new task domain and expensive data annotation on domains without existing labeled validation sets. A critical insight is that simple Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning often performs competitively with these complex systems, suggesting that the fundamental reasoning unit of MASes, CoT, warrants further investigation. To this end, we present a new paradigm for automatic MAS design that pivots the focus to optimizing CoT reasoning. We introduce the Agentic Reasoning Module (ARM), an agentic generalization of CoT where each granular reasoning step is executed by a specialized reasoning module. This module is discovered through a tree search over the code space, starting from a simple CoT module and evolved using mutations informed by reflection on execution traces. The resulting ARM acts as a versatile reasoning building block which can be utilized as a direct recursive loop or as a subroutine in a learned meta-orchestrator. Our approach significantly outperforms both manually designed MASes and state-of-the-art automatic MAS design methods. Crucially, MASes built with ARM exhibit superb generalization, maintaining high performance across different foundation models and task domains without further optimization.
title ARM: Discovering Agentic Reasoning Modules for Generalizable Multi-Agent Systems
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05746