Chenyang Lin
2026
Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation
Xiaowen Ma | Yunpu Ma | Chenyang Lin | Sikuan Yan | Jinhe Bi | Zixuan Cao | Yijun Tian | Volker Tresp | Hinrich Schuetze
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xiaowen Ma | Yunpu Ma | Chenyang Lin | Sikuan Yan | Jinhe Bi | Zixuan Cao | Yijun Tian | Volker Tresp | Hinrich Schuetze
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network (ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative team focused on a specific subtask. The proposed framework follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase - Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase - Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables our framework to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across seven benchmark datasets, ANN surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.
2025
SwarmAgentic: Towards Fully Automated Agentic System Generation via Swarm Intelligence
Yao Zhang | Chenyang Lin | Shijie Tang | Haokun Chen | Shijie Zhou | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yao Zhang | Chenyang Lin | Shijie Tang | Haokun Chen | Shijie Zhou | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The rapid progress of Large Language Models has advanced agentic systems in decision-making, coordination, and task execution. Yet, existing agentic system generation frameworks lack full autonomy, missing from-scratch agent generation, self-optimizing agent functionality, and collaboration, limiting adaptability and scalability. We propose **SwarmAgentic**, the *first framework that fully automates agentic system generation, optimization, and collaboration*, constructing agents from scratch and jointly refining functionality and coordination via language-driven exploration. To enable efficient search over system-level structures, SwarmAgentic maintains a population of candidate systems and evolves them via feedback-guided updates, drawing inspiration from Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). We evaluate our method on six real-world, open-ended, and exploratory tasks involving high-level planning, system-level coordination, and creative reasoning. Given only a task description and an objective function, SwarmAgentic outperforms all baselines, achieving a **+261.8% relative improvement** over ADAS on the TravelPlanner benchmark, highlighting the effectiveness of full automation in structurally unconstrained tasks. This framework marks a significant step toward scalable and autonomous agentic system design, bridging swarm intelligence with fully automated system multi-agent generation.