# Agent Context Protocols Enhance Collective Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14569 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14569/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [State-Centric Decision Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12755/) (2026)
- [AECP: Artifact-Exclusive Communication Protocol for Multi-Agent Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06481/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI agents have become increasingly adept at complex tasks such as coding, reasoning, and multimodal understanding. However, building generalist systems requires moving beyond individual agents to collective inference -- a paradigm where multi-agent systems with diverse, task-specialized agents complement one another through structured communication and collaboration. Today, coordination is usually handled with imprecise, ad-hoc natural language, which limits complex interaction and hinders interoperability with domain-specific agents. We introduce Agent context protocols (ACPs): a domain- and agent-agnostic family of structured protocols for agent-agent communication, coordination, and error handling. ACPs combine (i) persistent execution blueprints -- explicit dependency graphs that store intermediate agent outputs -- with (ii) standardized message schemas, enabling robust and fault-tolerant multi-agent collective inference. ACP-powered generalist systems reach state-of-the-art performance: 28.3 % accuracy on AssistantBench for long-horizon web assistance and best-in-class multimodal technical reports, outperforming commercial AI systems in human evaluation. ACPs are highly modular and extensible, allowing practitioners to build top-tier generalist agents quickly.