Agents & RL Aug 2025 · #83 most cited · 66 citations

Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL

Weizhen Li et al.

arXiv:2508.13167

In short

Chain-of-Agents trains one model to do what a multi-agent system does, switching between tool and role-playing agents inside a single reasoning chain. It is taught by distilling existing multi-agent systems, then improved with agentic RL, with everything open-sourced.

Why it matters

It asks whether multi-agent orchestration can be folded into a single model.

Read first

The 3 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.

Starting from scratch? The full route 25 ideas · basics first
  1. Dataset ✓ understood

    A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.

  2. Training ✓ understood

    The process of fitting a model to data by repeatedly measuring how wrong its outputs are and adjusting its parameters to reduce that error.

  3. Machine Learning ✓ understood

    Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.

  4. Neural Network ✓ understood

    A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.

  5. Activation Function ✓ understood

    A non-linear function applied to neuron outputs that introduces non-linearity, enabling networks to learn complex patterns.

  6. Softmax ✓ understood

    A function that turns a list of scores (logits) into probabilities that are all positive and sum to 1; the standard output of classifiers and language models.

  7. Knowledge Distillation · read first ✓ understood

    Training a smaller 'student' model to mimic a larger 'teacher' model, transferring knowledge while reducing size.

  8. Reinforcement Learning · read first ✓ understood

    Learning through interaction with an environment, receiving rewards or penalties to learn optimal behavior policies.

  9. Natural Language Processing ✓ understood

    The field of AI that lets computers read, interpret, translate and generate human language, from spam filters and search to chatbots.

  10. Token ✓ understood

    The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing a word, subword, or character. Tokens are the fundamental building blocks for LLM input and output.

  11. Tokenization ✓ understood

    Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.

  12. Language Modeling ✓ understood

    Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.

  13. Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.

  14. Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).

  15. Pre-training ✓ understood

    Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.

  16. Feature ✓ understood

    A single measurable property of an example, such as a house's floor area or how many links an email contains, used as an input to a model.

  17. Deep Learning ✓ understood

    A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.

  18. Representation Learning ✓ understood

    Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.

  19. Embedding ✓ understood

    A list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item, learned so that similar items end up close together.

  20. Attention Mechanism ✓ understood

    A technique that lets a neural network weigh every part of its input when producing each output, focusing on the parts most relevant at that step.

  21. Transformer ✓ understood

    A neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, built from stacked self-attention and feed-forward layers; the basis of nearly every modern large language model.

  22. Large Language Model ✓ understood

    A neural network, almost always a transformer, trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, answer, summarize and follow instructions.

  23. Context Window ✓ understood

    The maximum number of tokens an LLM can process at once, including both input prompt and generated output. Also called context length.

  24. Tool Use ✓ understood

    LLMs learning to call external tools, APIs, or functions to extend capabilities beyond text generation (calculators, search, code execution).

  25. AI Agent · read first ✓ understood

    A system where a large language model decides its own next steps in a loop: calling tools, reading the results, and continuing until the task is done.

In the frontier

Rank
#83 of 100
Citations
66
as of Aug 9, 2026
Published
Aug 2025

Topics: Agent training and self-evolution , RL for reasoning , Search and deep research

Selection: 1kpapers.com by Together AI, most-cited as of Aug 9, 2026

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