CoEvolve: Counterfactual-Guided Co-Evolution of Memory and Collaboration in Multi-Agent Systems

Overview & Synopsis

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks. Yet their memory and collaboration architectures often remain static, constraining continued adaptation and improvement over time. Recent work addresses this limitation by evolving memory or collaboration based on interaction experience. However, updates to these interdependent components are not necessarily aligned: an evolved workflow may require experience that memory does not provide, while evolved memory may encode guidance that the workflow cannot use. To address this problem, we propose CoEvolve, a skill-centered framework for aligned memory--collaboration evolution. CoEvolve represents reusable local collaboration patterns as skills that link evolving collaboration decisions to their supporting memories. It further compares original and counterfactual trajectories to identify local evolution signals, which coordinate updates to the skill library, skill memory, and executor memories across rounds. Experiments on the ALFWorld and WebShop benchmarks confirm that CoEvolve achieves the best overall performance among the evaluated baselines, while ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of aligned co-evolution and counterfactual-guided evolution.