# AgentArk: Distilling Multi-Agent Intelligence into a Single LLM Agent

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03955 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03955/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 62 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)
- 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 62)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19118/) (2023)
- [Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08935/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01680/) (2024)
- [MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12284/) (2023)
- [A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13501/) (2024)
- [AgentVerse: Facilitating Multi-Agent Collaboration and Exploring Emergent Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10848/) (2023)
- [MedMCQA : A Large-scale Multi-Subject Multi-Choice Dataset for Medical domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14371/) (2022)
- [A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03011/) (2021)
- [Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18734/) (2026)
- [QMSum: A New Benchmark for Query-based Multi-domain Meeting Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05938/) (2021)
- [ReConcile: Round-Table Conference Improves Reasoning via Consensus among Diverse LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13007/) (2023)
- [Tool Learning with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08354/) (2023)
- [Towards a Science of Scaling Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08296/) (2025)
- [LLM Multi-Agent Systems: Challenges and Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03578/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13167/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Step-by-step Reasoning Traces: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12289/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08446/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Consensus Seeking via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20151/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [ARLArena: A Unified Framework for Stable Agentic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21534/) (2026)
- [UniSD: Towards a Unified Self-Distillation Framework for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06597/) (2026)
- [From Multi-Agent to Single-Agent: When Is Skill Distillation Beneficial?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01608/) (2026)
- [Large Language Model Post-Training: A Unified View of Off-Policy and On-Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07941/) (2026)
- [Latent Agents: A Post-Training Procedure for Internalized Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24881/) (2026)
- [FlowBank: Query-Adaptive Agentic Workflows Optimization through Precompute-and-Reuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11290/) (2026)
- [EGTR-Review: Efficient Evidence-Grounded Scientific Peer Review Generation via Multi-Agent Teacher Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06025/) (2026)
- [Teacher Supervision over Representation Equivalence Classes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03572/) (2026)
- [PROOF-Gen: From Optimized Data to Better Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23911/) (2026)
- [From Collaboration to Capability: Internalizing Routed LLM Experts into Compact Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12578/) (2026)
- [Black-Box Auditing of Epistemic Reliability in Multi-Agent Debate Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32361/) (2026)
- [Waggle: Learning One Anonymous Local Law for Self-Organizing LLM Swarms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34136/) (2026)
- [CoEvoke: Evoking Multi-Agent Collaboration for Trajectory Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14021/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While large language model (LLM) multi-agent systems achieve superior reasoning performance through iterative debate, practical deployment is limited by their high computational cost and error propagation. This paper proposes AgentArk, a novel framework to distill multi-agent dynamics into the weights of a single model, effectively transforming explicit test-time interactions into implicit model capabilities. This equips a single agent with the intelligence of multi-agent systems while remaining computationally efficient. Specifically, we investigate three hierarchical distillation strategies across various models, tasks, scaling, and scenarios: reasoning-enhanced fine-tuning; trajectory-based augmentation; and process-aware distillation. By shifting the burden of computation from inference to training, the distilled models preserve the efficiency of one agent while exhibiting strong reasoning and self-correction performance of multiple agents. They further demonstrate enhanced robustness and generalization across diverse reasoning tasks. We hope this work can shed light on future research on efficient and robust multi-agent development. Our code is at https://github.com/AIFrontierLab/AgentArk.