# Agora: Git as Shared Memory for Collective AutoResearch

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18094 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18094/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 25 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01373/) (2023)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07924/) (2023)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [ChemCrow: Augmenting large-language models with chemistry tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05376/) (2023)
- [AgentVerse: Facilitating Multi-Agent Collaboration and Exploring Emergent Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10848/) (2023)
- [Illuminating search spaces by mapping elites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.04909/) (2015)
- [Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04227/) (2025)
- [MLAgentBench: Evaluating Language Agents on Machine Learning Experimentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03302/) (2023)
- [Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22954/) (2025)
- [ScienceAgentBench: Toward Rigorous Assessment of Language Agents for Data-Driven Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05080/) (2024)
- [Magentic-One: A Generalist Multi-Agent System for Solving Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04468/) (2024)
- [ResearchAgent: Iterative Research Idea Generation over Scientific Literature with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07738/) (2024)
- [Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET): Endlessly Generating Increasingly Complex and Diverse Learning Environments and Their Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01753/) (2019)
- [Cerebras-GPT: Open Compute-Optimal Language Models Trained on the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Cluster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03208/) (2023)
- [ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19980/) (2026)
- [Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06503/) (2021)
- [Computing Environments for Reproducibility: Capturing the "Whole Tale"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00400/) (2018)
- [Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20639/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Advancing Model Research in AgentX: Long-Horizon Autonomy for Industrial Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30001/) (2026)
- [Maat: Independent Deterministic Contract-Based Governance for Multi-Agent LLM Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34017/) (2026)
- [GitSwarm: Decentralized Compounding Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04862/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Research agents working in separate sessions need to know what others have tried and which results they can build on. Agora stores their contributions as an append-only directed acyclic graph (DAG) in Git. Each commit records a result, insight, hypothesis, verification, or report and links it to prior work. Searchable views show leading results, neglected branches, and verification status; diversity-aware recommendations suggest experiments beyond the current leaders. We report a run of nearly 12 days in which 13 language-model workers, with no assigned tasks or central planner, used Agora to solve a weight-transfer problem. Given 141 pretrained donor models and a frozen 119.6M-parameter attention--SSM hybrid whose dimensions match no donor, the workers had to initialize the target without training data or gradient updates. They published 1,703 contributions and reduced the development evaluator score from 3.39 to 1.899 bits per byte, closing 62% of the gap to a trained GPT-2 124M. The best method compresses donor next-token statistics into the target's embedding and output head, then adds short-range context through sparse edits to attention, feed-forward, and state-space blocks. Its 145-commit ancestry spans 15 accounts. Participants also posted 165 verifications of 95 targets, each by an account other than the target's author, with no reported failures. The run documents how agents reused and verified shared work. Measuring the effect on discovery per unit of compute requires a matched comparison.