[2501.07813] Talk to Right Specialists: Iterative Routing in Multi-agent Systems for Question Answering

Computer Science > Multiagent Systems arXiv:2501.07813 (cs) [Submitted on 14 Jan 2025 (v1), last revised 6 Apr 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:Talk to Right Specialists: Iterative Routing in Multi-agent Systems for Question Answering Authors:Feijie Wu, Zitao Li, Fei Wei, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jing Gao View a PDF of the paper titled Talk to Right Specialists: Iterative Routing in Multi-agent Systems for Question Answering, by Feijie Wu and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) agents are increasingly deployed to answer questions over local knowledge bases that cannot be centralized due to knowledge-sovereignty constraints. This results in two recurring failures in production: users do not know which agent to consult, and complex questions require evidence distributed across multiple agents. To overcome these challenges, we propose RIRS, a training-free orchestration framework to enable a multi-agent system for question answering. In detail, RIRS summarizes each agent's local corpus in an embedding space, enabling a user-facing server to route queries only to the most relevant agents, reducing latency and avoiding noisy "broadcast-to-all" contexts. For complicated questions, the server can iteratively aggregate responses to derive intermediate results and refine the question to bridge the gap toward a comprehensive answer. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RIRS, including its ability to precisely sele...