EVOCHAMBER: Test-Time Co-evolution of Multi-Agent System at Individual, Team, and Population Scales
Abstract
We argue that multi-agent test-time evolution is not single-agent evolution replicated N times. A single-agent learner can only evolve its own context and memory. A multi-agent system additionally evolves who collaborates, how they collaborate, and how knowledge flows across the population. These components have no single-agent counterpart and can produce phenomena such as emergent specialization. Yet prior test-time methods either confine experiences to individual agents, forfeiting cross-agent learning, or broadcast symmetrically to all agents, erasing the specialization that makes collaboration valuable. We present EVOCHAMBER, a training-free framework that instantiates test-time evolution at three levels over a coevolving agent pool. At its core is CODREAM (Collaborative Dreaming), a post-failure protocol in which agents collaboratively reflect, distill insights, and route them asymmetrically from strong agents to weak ones on the failed niche, preserving specialization while filling knowledge gaps. Team-level operators assemble niche-conditioned teams and select collaboration structures online. Population-level lifecycle operators fork, merge, prune, and seed agents under performance pressure. On three heterogeneous task streams with Qwen3-8B, EvoChamber reaches 63.9% on competition math, 75.7% on code, and 87.1% on multi-domain reasoning, outperforming the best baseline by 30% relative on math. These gains transfer to GPT-4.1-mini. Ablations attribute the largest single drop of -10.8% to removing CODREAM, confirming asymmetric cross-agent transfer as the primary driver. Starting from 20 identically initialized agents, four to five stable niche specialists spontaneously emerge, a structural signature of multi-agent evolution that no single-agent learner can express.