ABSTRAL: Automatic Design of Multi-Agent Systems Through Iterative Refinement and Topology Optimization

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22791v1
• Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:28:07 GMT
• Title: ABSTRAL: Automatic Design of Multi-Agent Systems Through Iterative Refinement and Topology Optimization
• Abstract summary: We introduce ABSTRAL, a framework that treats MAS architecture as an evolving natural-language document.<n>Under fixed turn budgets, ensembles achieve only 26% turn efficiency, with 66% of tasks exhausting the limit.<n> contrastive trace analysis discovers specialist roles absent from any initial design.
• Score: 0.033246582398800045
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: How should multi-agent systems be designed, and can that design knowledge be captured in a form that is inspectable, revisable, and transferable? We introduce ABSTRAL, a framework that treats MAS architecture as an evolving natural-language document, an artifact refined through contrastive trace analysis. Three findings emerge. First, we provide a precise measurement of the multi-agent coordination tax: under fixed turn budgets, ensembles achieve only 26% turn efficiency, with 66% of tasks exhausting the limit, yet still improve over single-agent baselines by discovering parallelizable task decompositions. Second, design knowledge encoded in documents transfers: topology reasoning and role templates learned on one domain provide a head start on new domains, with transferred seeds matching coldstart iteration 3 performance in a single iteration. Third, contrastive trace analysis discovers specialist roles absent from any initial design, a capability no prior system demonstrates. On SOPBench (134 bank tasks, deterministic oracle), ABSTRAL reaches 70% validation / 65.96% test pass rate with a GPT-4o backbone. We release the converged documents as inspectable design rationale.

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