Graph explorer

Recursive Agent Optimization

We introduce Recursive Agent Optimization (RAO), a reinforcement learning approach for training recursive agents: agents that can spawn and delegate sub-tasks to new instantiations of themselves recursively. Recursive agents implement an inference-time scaling algorithm that naturally allows agents to scale to longer contexts and generalize to more difficult problems via divide-and-conquer. RAO provides a method to train models to best take advantage of such recursive inference, teaching agents when and how to delegate and communicate. We find that recursive agents trained in this way enjoy better training efficiency, can scale to tasks that go beyond the model's context window, generalize to tasks much harder than the ones the agent was trained on, and can enjoy reduced wall-clock time compared to single-agent systems.

10 nodes45 linksoverview previewRecursive Agent Optimization
10 nodes45 links
Recursive Agent Optimization10 visible / 10 total nodes / 45 links
Related contextRelated contextRelated contextRelated contextRelated contextRelated contextCo-authorshipCo-authorshipCo-authorshipCo-authorshipCo-authorshipCo-authorshipCo-authorshipCo-authorshipCo-authorshipCo-authorshipWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onAuthorshipWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onWorks onAuthorshipAuthorshipAuthorshipTopic signalTopic signalTopic signalTopic signalAuthorshipWRecursive Agent Optimizationpreprint / 2026AApurva GandhiResearcherASatyaki ChakrabortyResearcherAXiangjun WangResearcherAAviral KumarResearcherTArtificial Intelligence22915 worksTMachine Learning49008 worksTComputation and Language14115 worksTMultiagent Systems1840 worksAGraham NeubigResearcher
PaperSignal 109 links

Recursive Agent Optimization

preprint / 2026

Open