[2603.22791] ABSTRAL: Automatic Design of Multi-Agent Systems Through Iterative Refinement and Topology Optimization

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2603.22791 (cs) [Submitted on 24 Mar 2026] Title:ABSTRAL: Automatic Design of Multi-Agent Systems Through Iterative Refinement and Topology Optimization Authors:Weijia Song, Jiashu Yue, Zhe Pang View a PDF of the paper titled ABSTRAL: Automatic Design of Multi-Agent Systems Through Iterative Refinement and Topology Optimization, by Weijia Song and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) 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),...