EMMA: Structured Episodic Memory for Multi-Agent Workflow Synthesis

Abstract

Deploying LLM agents in specialized domains often require fine-grained task-specific procedures and knowledge a general model lacks, yet parameter training is costly and non-interpretable, and hand-engineered agent systems shift the cost to expert labor. Episodic memory updates at context level, but single agent adaptation struggles to alleviate cross-task interference, especially with complex tasks such as multi-application navigation or data pool analysis. Although multi-agent evolution alleviates this problem, existing methods lack clear definitions on update rules and rely on the backbone model to decide where and how much the system changes. This ill-scoped evolution makes learning follow the backbone's structural preferences rather than the observed failures: one backbone accumulates skills while another spawns agents. We present EMMA (structured Episodic Memory for Multi-Agent workflow synthesis), which treats the configuration of a multi-agent system (controller routing memory, specialists inheriting a generalist prompt, and per-step procedural skills) as episodic memory. EMMA makes the ownership and admissibility of updates explicit: a reflector assigns each diagnosed failure to the scope owning its correction and proposes one edit within it, and backbone-independent guards keep every accepted edit scoped, incremental and bounded. Across KramaBench, AppWorld and BBEH with five backbones and four baselines (ACE, GEPA, EvoMAS and ADAS), EMMA attains the best overall performance on every benchmark, up to 32.5% over the strongest baseline, maintains consistent improvements across backbones, and uses 17-38% fewer training executions than the most efficient baseline.