CORAL: Towards Autonomous Multi-Agent Evolution for Open-Ended Discovery
This addresses the need for more autonomous and efficient open-ended discovery in AI research, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of limited autonomy in LLM-based evolution for open-ended discovery by introducing CORAL, a framework for autonomous multi-agent evolution, which achieves state-of-the-art results on 10 tasks with 3-10 times higher improvement rates and fewer evaluations than baselines, including improving a kernel engineering score from 1363 to 1103 cycles.
Large language model (LLM)-based evolution is a promising approach for open-ended discovery, where progress requires sustained search and knowledge accumulation. Existing methods still rely heavily on fixed heuristics and hard-coded exploration rules, which limit the autonomy of LLM agents. We present CORAL, the first framework for autonomous multi-agent evolution on open-ended problems. CORAL replaces rigid control with long-running agents that explore, reflect, and collaborate through shared persistent memory, asynchronous multi-agent execution, and heartbeat-based interventions. It also provides practical safeguards, including isolated workspaces, evaluator separation, resource management, and agent session and health management. Evaluated on diverse mathematical, algorithmic, and systems optimization tasks, CORAL sets new state-of-the-art results on 10 tasks, achieving 3-10 times higher improvement rates with far fewer evaluations than fixed evolutionary search baselines across tasks. On Anthropic's kernel engineering task, four co-evolving agents improve the best known score from 1363 to 1103 cycles. Mechanistic analyses further show how these gains arise from knowledge reuse and multi-agent exploration and communication. Together, these results suggest that greater agent autonomy and multi-agent evolution can substantially improve open-ended discovery. Code is available at https://github.com/Human-Agent-Society/CORAL.