EMMA: Structured Episodic Memory for Multi-Agent Workflow Synthesis

Ruijia Niu, Kaiwen Liu, Rose Yu, Kristina Klinkner

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…