MonoScale: Scaling Multi-Agent System with Monotonic Improvement

Agentic AI
Published: arXiv: 2601.23219v1
Authors

Shuai Shao Yixiang Liu Bingwei Lu Weinan Zhang

Abstract

In recent years, LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have advanced rapidly, using a router to decompose tasks and delegate subtasks to specialized agents. A natural way to expand capability is to scale up the agent pool by continually integrating new functional agents or tool interfaces, but naive expansion can trigger performance collapse when the router cold-starts on newly added, heterogeneous, and unreliable agents. We propose MonoScale, an expansion-aware update framework that proactively generates a small set of agent-conditioned familiarization tasks, harvests evidence from both successful and failed interactions, and distills it into auditable natural-language memory to guide future routing. We formalize sequential augmentation as a contextual bandit and perform trust-region memory updates, yielding a monotonic non-decreasing performance guarantee across onboarding rounds. Experiments on GAIA and Humanity's Last Exam show stable gains as the agent pool grows, outperforming naive scale-up and strong-router fixed-pool baselines.

Paper Summary

Problem
Multi-agent systems (MAS) built on large language models (LLMs) are prone to performance collapse when they are expanded by continuously integrating new agents or tools. This can lead to cold-start misrouting, where the router struggles to make effective decisions about which agents to use, resulting in a degradation of overall performance.
Key Innovation
MonoScale is a novel expansion-aware update framework that proactively generates a small set of agent-conditioned familiarization tasks to collect controlled feedback from new agents. It then distills this feedback into auditable natural-language memory to guide future routing decisions. This approach ensures that the router learns when to use or not use the new agent, preventing performance collapse.
Practical Impact
MonoScale can significantly improve the robustness of agentic applications in areas such as research assistance, enterprise automation, and software engineering. By reducing cold-start misrouting and preventing cascading failures, MonoScale can help make large-scale, open agent onboarding in the future Agentic Web more reliable and efficient.
Analogy / Intuitive Explanation
Imagine a large team of experts working together to solve a complex problem. As new experts join the team, the team leader (router) needs to learn how to effectively use their skills and expertise. MonoScale is like a specialized training program that helps the team leader learn about the new expert's strengths and weaknesses, so that they can make informed decisions about who to assign to each task. This ensures that the team works efficiently and effectively, even as it grows and changes over time.
Paper Information
Categories:
cs.MA cs.AI
Published Date:

arXiv ID:

2601.23219v1

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