AgentPSO: Evolving Agent Reasoning Skill via Multi-agent Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

Multi-agent reasoning has shown promise for improving the problem-solving ability of large language models by allowing multiple agents to explore diverse reasoning paths. However, most existing multi-agent methods rely on inference-time debate or aggregation, which can be vulnerable to incorrect peer influence and biased consensus. Moreover, the agents' reasoning procedures remain static, as they do not accumulate reusable behaviors across tasks. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{AgentPSO}, a particle-swarm-inspired framework for evolving multi-agent reasoning skills. AgentPSO treats each agent as a particle-like reasoner whose state is a natural-language skill and whose velocity is a semantic update direction, iteratively guiding agents toward higher-performing skill configurations. Across training iterations, each agent updates its skill by combining its previous velocity, personal-best skill, global-best skill, and a self-reflective direction derived from peer reasoning trajectories. This enables agents to learn reusable reasoning behaviors by drawing on their own experience and on the strongest skills found by the population, without updating the parameters of the backbone language model. Experiments on mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks show that AgentPSO improves over static single-agent skills and test-time-only multi-agent reasoning baselines. The evolved skills further transfer across benchmarks and to another backbone model, suggesting that AgentPSO captures reusable reasoning procedures rather than merely optimizing benchmark-specific prompts. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/HYUNMIN-HWANG/AgentPSO/.