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.