NeuroMAS: Multi-Agent Systems as Neural Networks with Joint Reinforcement Learning

원문 초록

Multi-agent language systems are often built as hand-designed workflows, where agents are assigned semantic roles and communication protocols are specified in advance. We propose NeuroMAS, a framework that treats a multi-agent language system as a trainable and scalable neural-network-like architecture with hidden textual intermediate signals. In NeuroMAS, language-agent nodes are role-free but structure-aware: the topology determines how information can flow, while reward-based training determines how nodes communicate, specialize, and coordinate. This formulation shifts multi-agent design from workflow engineering toward architecture design, where depth, width, connectivity, and growth protocol become scalable sources of capability. We provide a theoretical perspective showing why such modular text-valued computation can be parameter-efficient when tasks admit stable decompositions. Experiments show that NeuroMAS improves over both inference-time collaboration methods and trained baselines, and that its gains are not explained by trainable parameter count alone. We further find that organizational scaling is path-dependent: larger systems can fail when trained from scratch, but become stronger when grown progressively from smaller trained systems. These results suggest that learned multi-agent organization is a promising scaling axis for language-model reasoning and generation.