Experience as a Compass: Multi-agent RAG with Evolving Orchestration and Agent Prompts

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Sha, Ramakrishnan, Naren
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Sha
Ramakrishnan, Naren
author_facet Li, Sha
Ramakrishnan, Naren
contents Multi-agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), wherein each agent takes on a specific role, supports hard queries that require multiple steps and sources, or complex reasoning. Existing approaches, however, rely on static agent behaviors and fixed orchestration strategies, leading to brittle performance on diverse, multi-hop tasks. We identify two key limitations: the lack of continuously adaptive orchestration mechanisms and the absence of behavior-level learning for individual agents. To this end, we propose HERA, a hierarchical framework that jointly evolves multi-agent orchestration and role-specific agent prompts. At the global level, HERA optimizes query-specific agent topologies through reward-guided sampling and experience accumulation. At the local level, Role-Aware Prompt Evolution refines agent behaviors via credit assignment and dual-axes adaptation along operational and behavioral principles, enabling targeted, role-conditioned improvements. On six knowledge-intensive benchmarks, HERA achieves an average improvement of 38.69\% over recent baselines while maintaining robust generalization and token efficiency. Topological analyses reveal emergent self-organization, where sparse exploration yields compact, high-utility multi-agent networks, demonstrating both efficient coordination and robust reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_00901
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Experience as a Compass: Multi-agent RAG with Evolving Orchestration and Agent Prompts
Li, Sha
Ramakrishnan, Naren
Artificial Intelligence
Multi-agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), wherein each agent takes on a specific role, supports hard queries that require multiple steps and sources, or complex reasoning. Existing approaches, however, rely on static agent behaviors and fixed orchestration strategies, leading to brittle performance on diverse, multi-hop tasks. We identify two key limitations: the lack of continuously adaptive orchestration mechanisms and the absence of behavior-level learning for individual agents. To this end, we propose HERA, a hierarchical framework that jointly evolves multi-agent orchestration and role-specific agent prompts. At the global level, HERA optimizes query-specific agent topologies through reward-guided sampling and experience accumulation. At the local level, Role-Aware Prompt Evolution refines agent behaviors via credit assignment and dual-axes adaptation along operational and behavioral principles, enabling targeted, role-conditioned improvements. On six knowledge-intensive benchmarks, HERA achieves an average improvement of 38.69\% over recent baselines while maintaining robust generalization and token efficiency. Topological analyses reveal emergent self-organization, where sparse exploration yields compact, high-utility multi-agent networks, demonstrating both efficient coordination and robust reasoning.
title Experience as a Compass: Multi-agent RAG with Evolving Orchestration and Agent Prompts
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00901