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Automated Design of Agentic Systems

Canonical reference. 93% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

50 Pith papers citing it
Background 93% of classified citations
abstract

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We describe a newly forming research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, workflows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

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representative citing papers

LLMs Improving LLMs: Agentic Discovery for Test-Time Scaling

cs.CL · 2026-05-08 · conditional · novelty 8.0 · 2 refs

AutoTTS discovers width-depth test-time scaling controllers through agentic search in a pre-collected trajectory environment, yielding better accuracy-cost tradeoffs than hand-designed baselines on math reasoning tasks at low cost.

Glite ARF: Verifier-Driven Research with Parallel LLM Coding Agents

cs.MA · 2026-06-25 · accept · novelty 7.0

Glite ARF introduces a verifier-driven three-role framework for parallel LLM coding agents, demonstrated by first- and second-place finishes in the BEA 2026 vocabulary-difficulty shared task across three languages with 29.9-35.9% RMSE reduction at ~$450 API cost.

Self-Harness: Harnesses That Improve Themselves

cs.CL · 2026-06-08 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Self-Harness lets LLM agents autonomously refine their interaction harnesses through weakness mining, proposal generation, and validation, raising held-out pass rates on Terminal-Bench-2.0 from 40.5% to 61.9%, 23.8% to 38.1%, and 42.9% to 57.1% across three models.

PACE: Anytime-Valid Acceptance Tests for Self-Evolving Agents

cs.AI · 2026-06-06 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

PACE is a training-free anytime-valid commit gate using testing-by-betting e-processes that controls per-candidate false-commit probability for self-evolving agents and reduces spurious edits compared to greedy acceptance.

Harnessing Agentic Evolution

cs.AI · 2026-05-13 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

AEvo introduces a meta-agent that edits the evolution procedure or agent context based on accumulated state, outperforming baselines by 26% relative improvement on agentic benchmarks and achieving SOTA on open-ended tasks.

Synthesizing Multi-Agent Harnesses for Vulnerability Discovery

cs.CR · 2026-04-22 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

AgentFlow uses a typed graph DSL covering roles, prompts, tools, topology and protocol plus a runtime-signal feedback loop to optimize multi-agent harnesses, reaching 84.3% on TerminalBench-2 and discovering ten new zero-days in Chrome including two critical sandbox escapes.

Recursive Self-Evolving Agents via Held-Out Selection

cs.AI · 2026-06-17 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

RSEA adds a strict held-out keep-better gate to recursive self-evolution of agent artifacts, yielding monotone-safe gains or parity with the base ReAct agent on ALFWorld, GAIA, τ-bench, and WebShop.

The Illusion of Multi-Agent Advantage

cs.AI · 2026-06-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Automatically generated multi-agent systems underperform CoT-SC on benchmarks and a new diagnostic dataset, exposing architectural bloat that fails to deliver functional utility.

Learning to Construct Practical Agentic Systems

cs.LG · 2026-05-29 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

A modular agent framework with pseudo-tools and learned fixed workflows that are cheaper and more accurate than dynamic planning, plus multi-objective optimization for cost and quality.

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