MAS-Architect: Declarative Multi-Agent System Design via Separation of Concerns

The Automated Design of Multi-Agent Systems (Auto-MAS) has emerged as a promising framework for addressing complex reasoning tasks. However, existing approaches often suffer from structural rigidity and entangle the design of system topology with the implementation of individual agents. To overcome these limitations, we propose MAS-Architect, a framework that automates MAS design through a novel code-based declarative MAS paradigm rooted in the Separation of Concerns principle. By decoupling topology planning from node implementation via a unified interface, our approach enables the from-scratch generation of task-adaptive architectures. We further employ a Distill-then-Explore training strategy to optimize these designs. Comprehensive experiments on five benchmarks show that MAS-Architect sets a new Pareto frontier in the efficiency–performance trade-off: it surpasses state-of-the-art methods while substantially lowering token usage. Notably, the framework achieves a strong average accuracy of 78.7% across benchmarks with an inference cost of only 2,533 tokens per query. Qualitative analysis reveals the autonomous emergence of advanced collaboration patterns, validating the generative flexibility of the declarative paradigm. Code will be available at https://github.com/ZJUHJ/mas_architect.