Route, Communicate, and Reason: Gated Routing and Adaptive Depth for Efficient Multi-Agent Reasoning

Multi-agent ensembling multiplies active parameters and inference cost without answering three basic questions: which agents to consult, how deeply a query should traverse a hierarchy of agents, and when inter-agent communication is worth its cost. We present GRADE (Gated Routing and Adaptive Depth for Efficient Reasoning), a hierarchical multi-agent system in which four lightweight learned gates jointly govern agent selection, hierarchy depth, inter-agent communication, and branch pruning. Training uses CoGRPO (Collaborative Group-Relative Policy Optimization), a novel critic-free recipe that adapts GRPO to multi-agent hierarchies and assigns a shared advantage signal to every gate and agent that participated in a rollout. Agent models are drawn from a hot-swappable Expert Registry; per-agent calibration maps allow experts to be replaced at inference time without retraining. At ~17B average active parameters, GRADE outperforms all baselines on GSM8K, MMLUPro, and GPQA, surpassing the strongest baseline by 4.8 points on MMLUPro at half the active compute. On AIME-2025, where model depth dominates, GRADE remains competitive to existing frameworks. Ablations isolate the hierarchy and masked cross-attention as the largest contributors to accuracy, and show that per-agent calibration is necessary for safe hot-swapping.