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A Gossip-Enhanced Communication Substrate for Agentic AI: Toward Decentralized Coordination in Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems

Khan, Nafiul I., Habiba, Mansura, Khan, Rafflesia

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As agentic platforms scale, agents are moving beyond fixed roles and predefined toolchains, creating an urgent need for flexible and decentralized coordination. Current structured communication protocols such as direct agent-to-agent messaging or MCP-style tool calls offer reliability, but they struggle to support the emergent and swarm-like intelligence required in large adaptive systems. Distributed agents must learn continuously, share context fluidly, and coordinate without depending solely on central planners. This paper revisits gossip protocols as a complementary substrate for agentic communication. Gossip mechanisms, long valued in distributed systems for their decentralized and fault-tolerant properties, provide scalable and adaptive diffusion of knowledge and fill gaps that structured protocols alone cannot efficiently address. However, gossip also introduces challenges, including semantic relevance, temporal staleness, and limited guarantees on action consistency in rapidly changing environments. We examine how gossip can support context-rich state propagation, resilient coordination under uncertainty, and emergent global awareness. We also outline open problems around semantic filtering, trust, and knowledge decay. Rather than proposing a complete framework, this paper presents a research agenda for integrating gossip into multi-agent communication stacks and argues that gossip is essential for future agentic ecosystems that must remain robust, adaptive, and self-organizing as their scale and autonomy increase.


Realistic gossip in Trust Game on networks: the GODS model

Majewski, Jan, Giardini, Francesca

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Gossip has been shown to be a relatively efficient solution to problems of cooperation in reputation-based systems of exchange, but many studies don't conceptualize gossiping in a realistic way, often assuming near-perfect information or broadcast-like dynamics of its spread. To solve this problem, we developed an agent-based model that pairs realistic gossip processes with different variants of Trust Game. The results show that cooperators suffer when local interactions govern spread of gossip, because they cannot discriminate against defectors. Realistic gossiping increases the overall amount of resources, but is more likely to promote defection. Moreover, even partner selection through dynamic networks can lead to high payoff inequalities among agent types. Cooperators face a choice between outcompeting defectors and overall growth. By blending direct and indirect reciprocity with reputations we show that gossiping increases the efficiency of cooperation by an order of magnitude.


A Continuized View on Nesterov Acceleration for Stochastic Gradient Descent and Randomized Gossip Mathieu Even

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce the "continuized" Nesterov acceleration, a close variant of Nesterov The two variables continuously mix following a linear ordinary differential equation and take gradient steps at random times. This continuized variant benefits from the best of the continuous and the discrete frameworks: as a continuous process, one can use differential calculus to analyze convergence and obtain analytical expressions for the parameters; and a discretization of the continuized process can be computed exactly with convergence rates similar to those of Nesterov original acceleration.



Finite-Time Global Optimality Convergence in Deep Neural Actor-Critic Methods for Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Zhang, Zhiyao, Oh, Myeung Suk, Hairi, FNU, Luo, Ziyue, Velasquez, Alvaro, Liu, Jia

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Actor-critic methods for decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) facilitate collaborative optimal decision making without centralized coordination, thus enabling a wide range of applications in practice. To date, however, most theoretical convergence studies for existing actor-critic decentralized MARL methods are limited to the guarantee of a stationary solution under the linear function approximation. This leaves a significant gap between the highly successful use of deep neural actor-critic for decentralized MARL in practice and the current theoretical understanding. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we make the first attempt to develop a deep neural actor-critic method for decentralized MARL, where both the actor and critic components are inherently non-linear. We show that our proposed method enjoys a global optimality guarantee with a finite-time convergence rate of O(1/T), where T is the total iteration times. This marks the first global convergence result for deep neural actor-critic methods in the MARL literature. We also conduct extensive numerical experiments, which verify our theoretical results.


Revisiting Gossip Protocols: A Vision for Emergent Coordination in Agentic Multi-Agent Systems

Habiba, Mansura, Khan, Nafiul I.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As agentic platforms scale, agents are evolving beyond static roles and fixed toolchains, creating a growing need for flexible, decentralized coordination. Today's structured communication protocols (e.g., direct agent-to-agent messaging) excel at reliability and task delegation, but they fall short in enabling emergent, swarm-like intelligence, where distributed agents continuously learn, adapt, and communicate to form collective cognition. This paper revisits gossip protocols, long valued in distributed systems for their fault tolerance and decentralization, and argues that they offer a missing layer for context-rich, adaptive communication in agentic AI. Gossip enables scalable, low-overhead dissemination of shared knowledge, but also raises unresolved challenges around semantic filtering, staleness, trustworthiness, and consistency in high-stakes environments. Rather than proposing a new framework, this work charts a research agenda for integrating gossip as a complementary substrate alongside structured protocols. We identify critical gaps in current agent-to-agent architectures, highlight where gossip could reshape assumptions about coordination, and outline open questions around intent propagation, knowledge decay, and peer-to-peer trust. Gossip is not a silver bullet, but overlooking it risks missing a key path toward resilient, reflexive, and self-organizing multi-agent systems.


A Hashgraph-Inspired Consensus Mechanism for Reliable Multi-Model Reasoning

Ogunsina, Kolawole E., Ogunsina, Morayo A.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Inconsistent outputs and hallucinations from large language models (LLMs) are major obstacles to reliable AI systems. When different proprietary reasoning models (RMs), such as those by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and xAI, are given the same complex request, they often produce divergent results due to variations in training and inference. This paper proposes a novel consensus mechanism, inspired by distributed ledger technology, to validate and converge these outputs, treating each RM as a black-box peer. Building on the Hashgraph consensus algorithm, our approach employs gossip-about-gossip communication and virtual voting to achieve agreement among an ensemble of RMs. We present an architectural design for a prototype system in which RMs iteratively exchange and update their answers, using information from each round to improve accuracy and confidence in subsequent rounds. This approach goes beyond simple majority voting by incorporating the knowledge and cross-verification content of every model. We justify the feasibility of this Hashgraph-inspired consensus for AI ensembles and outline its advantages over traditional ensembling techniques in reducing nonfactual outputs. Preliminary considerations for implementation, evaluation criteria for convergence and accuracy, and potential challenges are discussed. The proposed mechanism demonstrates a promising direction for multi-agent AI systems to self-validate and deliver high-fidelity responses in complex tasks.


"You Didn't Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip," Reviewed

The New Yorker

In August, 1918, Virginia Woolf spent a quiet stretch at Asheham, the country house that she and her husband, Leonard, rented in rural Sussex. "We've been practically alone, which has a very spiritual effect upon the mind," Woolf wrote to a friend, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell. After six months spent in such isolation, Woolf quipped, "I should be a kind of Saint, and Leonard an undoubted prophet. We should shed virtue on people as we walked along the roads." Alas, any pretensions to holiness had been dispelled by the arrival of house guests the previous evening: "I had such a bath of the flesh that I am far from unspotted this morning.


ML Mule: Mobile-Driven Context-Aware Collaborative Learning

Yu, Haoxiang, Berrocal, Javier, Julien, Christine

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has been integrated into nearly every aspect of daily life, powering applications from object detection with computer vision to large language models for writing emails and compact models in smart homes. These machine learning models cater to individual users but are often detached from them, as they are typically stored and processed in centralized data centers. This centralized approach raises privacy concerns, incurs high infrastructure costs, and struggles with personalization. Federated and fully decentralized learning methods have been proposed to address these issues, but they still depend on centralized servers or face slow convergence due to communication constraints. To overcome these challenges, we propose ML Mule, a approach that utilizes individual mobile devices as 'Mules' to train and transport model snapshots as they move through physical spaces, sharing these models with the physical 'Spaces' they inhabit. This method implicitly forms affinity groups among devices associated with users who share particular spaces, enabling collaborative model evolution, and protecting users' privacy. Our approach addresses several major shortcomings of traditional, federated, and fully decentralized learning systems. The proposed framework represents a new class of machine learning methods that are more robust, distributed, and personalized, bringing the field closer to realizing the original vision of intelligent, adaptive, and genuinely context-aware smart environments. The results show that ML Mule converges faster and achieves higher model accuracy compared to other existing methods.