Collaborative OS of Multi-Agent Systems

Jiazheng Kang, Ruochen Zhao, Dongying Lin, Gezi Li, Ting Bai


Abstract
Large language model-driven Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) face two key challenges in long-horizon tasks: collaboration workflows struggle to adapt to dynamic task states, and accumulated inter-agent interactions lead to lengthy, noisy contexts that degrade model performance and efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose MAS-OS, a collaborative Operating System (OS) for MAS. MAS-OS consists of three core modules: Memory Manager, Agent Scheduler, and Context Allocator. The Memory Manager maintains a structured memory pool and a global summary of agents’ interaction history. Based on the evolving memory states, the Agent Scheduler selects the next active agent, while the Context Allocator provides task-relevant memories to support effective context utilization. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MAS-OS. Compared with SOTA baselines, MAS-OS achieves an average improvement of 17.42% under the Llama-3.1-8B backbone. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MAS-OS-AD34.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1716
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
36661–36674
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1716/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiazheng Kang, Ruochen Zhao, Dongying Lin, Gezi Li, and Ting Bai. 2026. Collaborative OS of Multi-Agent Systems. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 36661–36674, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Collaborative OS of Multi-Agent Systems (Kang et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1716.pdf