DOVA: Deliberation-First Multi-Agent Orchestration for Autonomous Research Automation

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 4 Mar 2026] DOVA: Deliberation-First Multi-Agent Orchestration for Autonomous Research Automation Aaron Shen, Alfred Shen Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tool use, reasoning, and code generation, yet single-agent systems exhibit fundamental limitations when confronted with complex research tasks demanding multi-source synthesis, adversarial verification, and personalized delivery. We present DOVA (Deep Orchestrated Versatile Agent), a multi-agent platform introducing three key innovations: (1) deliberation-first orchestration, where explicit meta-reasoning precedes tool invocation, informed by a persistent user model and entity-aware conversation context; (2) hybrid collaborative reasoning, a composable three-phase pipeline unifying ensemble diversity, blackboard transparency, and iterative refinement; and (3) adaptive multi-tiered thinking, a six-level token-budget allocation scheme that reduces inference cost by 40-60% on simple tasks while preserving deep reasoning capacity. We formalize the core algorithms, present an architectural ablation study across seven system configurations, and analyze the contribution of each component to answer confidence, source coverage, and token efficiency. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2603.13327 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.13327v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.13327 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Alfred Shen [view email] [v1] Wed, 4 Mar 2026 20:58:40 UTC (413 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)