Zhuoyun Du
2026
Learning to Evolve: A Self-Improving Framework for Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Parameter Graph Optimization
Shan He | Runze Wang | Zhuoyun Du | Huiyu Bai | Zouying Cao | Yu Cheng | Bo Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Shan He | Runze Wang | Zhuoyun Du | Huiyu Bai | Zouying Cao | Yu Cheng | Bo Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Designing and optimizing multi-agent systems (MAS) is a complex, labor-intensive process of "Agent Engineering." Existing automatic optimization methods, primarily focused on flat prompt tuning, lack the structural awareness to debug the intricate web of interactions in MAS. More critically, these optimizers are static; they do not learn from experience to improve their own optimization strategies. To address these gaps, we introduce Textual Parameter Graph Optimization (TPGO), a framework that enables a multi-agent system to learn to evolve. TPGO first models the MAS as a Textual Parameter Graph (TPG), where agents, tools, and workflows are modular, optimizable nodes. To guide evolution, we derive "textual gradients," structured natural language feedback from execution traces, to pinpoint failures and suggest granular modifications. The core of our framework is Group Relative Agent Optimization (GRAO), a novel meta-learning strategy that learns from historical optimization experiences. By analyzing past successes and failures, GRAO becomes progressively better at proposing effective updates, allowing the system to learn how to optimize itself. Extensive experiments on complex benchmarks like GAIA and MCP-Universe show that TPGO significantly enhances the performance of state-of-the-art agent frameworks, achieving higher success rates through automated, self-improving optimization.
Enabling Agents to Communicate Entirely in Latent Space
Zhuoyun Du | Runze Wang | Huiyu Bai | Zouying Cao | Xiaoyong Zhu | Yu Cheng | Bo Zheng | Wei Chen | Haochao Ying
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhuoyun Du | Runze Wang | Huiyu Bai | Zouying Cao | Xiaoyong Zhu | Yu Cheng | Bo Zheng | Wei Chen | Haochao Ying
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While natural language is the de facto communication medium for LLM-based agents, it presents a fundamental constraint. The process of downsampling rich, internal latent states into discrete tokens inherently limits the depth and nuance of information that can be transmitted, thereby hindering collaborative problem-solving. Inspired by telepathy, which bypasses symbolic language in communication, we propose Interlat (Inter-agent Latent Space Communication), a paradigm that leverages the continuous last hidden states of an LLM as a representation of its thought for direct communication (termed "latent communication"). An additional learned compression process further compresses latent communication via latent space reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that Interlat outperforms both fine-tuned chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting and single-agent baselines, even across heterogeneous models, promoting more exploratory behavior and enabling genuine utilization of latent information. Further compression not only substantially accelerates inference by up to 24× but also maintains competitive performance through an efficient information-preserving mechanism. We position this work as a feasibility study of entirely latent space inter-agent communication, and our results highlight its potential, offering valuable insights for future research.
2025
Multi-Agent Collaboration via Cross-Team Orchestration
Zhuoyun Du | Chen Qian | Wei Liu | Zihao Xie | YiFei Wang | Rennai Qiu | Yufan Dang | Weize Chen | Cheng Yang | Ye Tian | Xuantang Xiong | Lei Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Zhuoyun Du | Chen Qian | Wei Liu | Zihao Xie | YiFei Wang | Rennai Qiu | Yufan Dang | Weize Chen | Cheng Yang | Ye Tian | Xuantang Xiong | Lei Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted various domains, especially through organized LLM-driven autonomous agents. A representative scenario is in software development, where agents can collaborate in a team like humans, following predefined phases to complete sub-tasks sequentially. However, for an agent team, each phase yields only one possible outcome. This results in the completion of only one development chain, thereby losing the opportunity to explore multiple potential decision paths within the solution space. Consequently leading to suboptimal results or extensive trial and error. To address this, we introduce Cross-Team Orchestration (Croto), a scalable multi-team framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various task-oriented solutions and interact with their insights in a self-independence while cross-team collaboration environment for superior solutions generation. Experiments reveal a notable increase in software quality compared to state-of-the-art baselines. We further tested our framework on story generation tasks, which demonstrated a promising generalization ability of our framework in other domains. The code and data is available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev/tree/macnet
LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution
Zhuoyun Du | Lujie Zheng | Renjun Hu | Yuyang Xu | Xiawei Li | Ying Sun | Wei Chen | Jian Wu | Haolei Cai | Haochao Ying
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhuoyun Du | Lujie Zheng | Renjun Hu | Yuyang Xu | Xiawei Li | Ying Sun | Wei Chen | Jian Wu | Haolei Cai | Haochao Ying
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Training medical personnel using standardized patients (SPs) remains a complex challenge, requiring extensive domain expertise and role-specific practice. Most research on Large Language Model (LLM)-based simulated patients focuses on improving data retrieval accuracy or adjusting prompts through human feedback. However, this focus has overlooked the critical need for patient agents to learn a standardized presentation pattern that transforms data into human-like patient responses through unsupervised simulations. To address this gap, we propose EvoPatient, a novel simulated patient framework in which a patient agent and doctor agents simulate the diagnostic process through multi-turn dialogues, simultaneously gathering experience to improve the quality of both questions and answers, ultimately enabling human doctor training. Extensive experiments on various cases demonstrate that, by providing only overall SP requirements, our framework improves over existing reasoning methods by more than 10% in requirement alignment and better human preference, while achieving an optimal balance of resource consumption after evolving over 200 cases for 10 hours, with excellent generalizability. Our system will be available at https://github.com/ZJUMAI/EvoPatient