Reasoner-Executor-Synthesizer: Scalable Agentic Architecture with Static O(1) Context Window
This addresses scalability and reliability issues for developers and users of autonomous agents in domains like scholarly research.
The paper tackles the problems of hallucination and high token costs in LLM-based agents using RAG by proposing the Reasoner-Executor-Synthesizer (RES) architecture, which achieves a mean token cost of 1,574 tokens regardless of dataset size and eliminates hallucination by design.
Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed as autonomous agents commonly use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), feeding retrieved documents into the context window, which creates two problems: the risk of hallucination grows with context length, and token cost scales linearly with dataset size. We propose the Reasoner-Executor-Synthesizer (RES) architecture, a three-layer design that strictly separates intent parsing (Reasoner), deterministic data retrieval and aggregation (Executor), and narrative generation (Synthesizer). The Executor uses zero LLM tokens and passes only fixed-size statistical summaries to the Synthesizer. We formally prove that RES achieves O(1) token complexity with respect to dataset size, and validate this on ScholarSearch, a scholarly research assistant backed by the Crossref API (130M+ articles). Across 100 benchmark runs, RES achieves a mean token cost of 1,574 tokens regardless of whether the dataset contains 42,000 or 16.3 million articles. The architecture eliminates data hallucination by construction: the LLM never sees raw records. KEYWORDS LLM agents; agentic architecture; hallucination elimination; token optimization; context window; retrieval-augmented generation; deterministic execution; scholarly metadata; Crossref API; O(1) complexity.