Autogenesis: A Self-Evolving Agent Protocol

Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15034

Authors: Wentao Zhang et al., April 2026

This paper introduces the Autogenesis Protocol (AGP), a self-evolution protocol for multi-agent systems that decouples what evolves from how evolution occurs. It's a direct response to a real problem: existing agent protocols like A2A and MCP underspecify cross-entity lifecycle management, version tracking, and safe update interfaces, which leads to monolithic compositions and brittle glue code.

AGP has two layers. The Resource Substrate Protocol Layer (RSPL) models prompts, agents, tools, environments, and memory as protocol-registered resources with explicit state, lifecycle, and versioned interfaces. The Self Evolution Protocol Layer (SEPL) specifies a closed-loop operator interface for proposing, assessing, and committing improvements — with auditable lineage and rollback.

Building on AGP, the authors present the Autogenesis System (AGS), a self-evolving multi-agent system that dynamically instantiates, retrieves, and refines protocol-registered resources during execution. They evaluate AGS on multiple long-horizon planning and tool-use benchmarks and show consistent improvements over strong baselines.

This is relevant to anyone building multi-agent orchestration because it formalizes something most teams are doing ad hoc: managing agent resources as versioned, lifecycled entities with safe evolution paths. The decoupling of "what evolves" from "how it evolves" is the key design insight — it means you can change prompts, tools, or agent configurations independently without cascading failures. The auditable lineage and rollback are what make self-evolution safe enough to run in production, not just in demos.

For Relay specifically, the RSPL resource model (prompts, agents, tools, environments, memory as first-class versioned resources) maps closely to what a task orchestration system needs to manage. The SEPL closed-loop evolution interface is essentially what "self-healing from corrections" looks like at the protocol level.