MA-Mesh: Resilient Multi-Agent Collaboration via Role-based Self-Healing

Junyong Lee, Woo Kyung Kim, Honguk Woo


Abstract
Effective collaboration in multi-agent systems requires mechanisms for coordination and adaptability in dynamic and uncertain environments. However, existing multi-agent systems rarely model resilience explicitly, instead relying on ad-hoc output correction that limits systematic, runtime management of robustness. In this work, we propose Multi-Agent Mesh (MA-Mesh), a framework that constructs a role-based self-healing layer on top of a collaboration pattern. Specifically, MA-Mesh generates resilience-aware system specifications and synthesizes them into executable multi-agent policy code. To enhance resilience, we introduce two self-healing mechanisms: Cross-agent reflection, a mechanism that allows agents to evaluate not only their own outcomes but also the performance of their peers, enabling informed behavioral adjustments and collective policy refinement; Role-based failover, a strategy which dynamically reassigns roles and enables agents to substitute for one another when sub-tasks fail or agents underperform, ensuring continuity of task execution. Experimental results across diverse tasks (e.g., software development, tool use, scientific reasoning) demonstrate that MA-Mesh significantly outperforms existing multi-agent systems in both task performance and robustness under system uncertainty.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1443
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
32933–32961
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1443/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junyong Lee, Woo Kyung Kim, and Honguk Woo. 2026. MA-Mesh: Resilient Multi-Agent Collaboration via Role-based Self-Healing. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 32933–32961, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MA-Mesh: Resilient Multi-Agent Collaboration via Role-based Self-Healing (Lee et al., EMNLP 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1443.pdf