# Graph of Agents: Principled Long Context Modeling by Emergent Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21848 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21848/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 37 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14508/) (2023)
- [RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06654/) (2024)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [MuSiQue: Multihop Questions via Single-hop Question Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00573/) (2021)
- [Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15595/) (2023)
- [The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07040/) (2017)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [On Variational Bounds of Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06922/) (2019)
- [RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18059/) (2024)
- [A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03011/) (2021)
- [A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12856/) (2023)
- [Exploring Length Generalization in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04901/) (2022)
- [Chain of Agents: Large Language Models Collaborating on Long-Context Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02818/) (2024)
- [A Human-Inspired Reading Agent with Gist Memory of Very Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09727/) (2024)
- [Walking Down the Memory Maze: Beyond Context Limit through Interactive Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05029/) (2023)
- [Long-Context LLMs Meet RAG: Overcoming Challenges for Long Inputs in RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05983/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Question Decomposition for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09758/) (2020)
- [Transformers Can Achieve Length Generalization But Not Robustly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09371/) (2024)
- [Talk Isn't Always Cheap: Understanding Failure Modes in Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05396/) (2025)
- [PEARL: Prompting Large Language Models to Plan and Execute Actions Over Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14564/) (2023)
- [LongRAG: A Dual-Perspective Retrieval-Augmented Generation Paradigm for Long-Context Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18050/) (2024)
- [GraphReader: Building Graph-based Agent to Enhance Long-Context Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14550/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [NeuroMAS: Multi-Agent Systems as Neural Networks with Joint Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16757/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As a model-agnostic approach to long context modeling, multi-agent systems can process inputs longer than a large language model's context window without retraining or architectural modifications. However, their performance often heavily relies on hand-crafted multi-agent collaboration strategies and prompt engineering, which limit generalizability. In this work, we introduce a principled framework that formalizes the model-agnostic long context modeling problem as a compression problem, yielding an information-theoretic compression objective. Building on this framework, we propose Graph of Agents (GoA), which dynamically constructs an input-dependent collaboration structure that maximizes this objective. For Llama 3.1 8B and Qwen3 8B across six document question answering benchmarks, GoA improves the average F1 score of retrieval-augmented generation by 5.7% and a strong multi-agent baseline using a fixed collaboration structure by 16.35%, respectively. Even with only a 2K context window, GoA surpasses the 128K context window Llama 3.1 8B on LongBench, showing a dramatic increase in effective context length. Our source code is available at https://github.com/tjoo512/graph-of-agents.