Cascade-Aware Multi-Agent Routing: Spatio-Temporal Sidecars and Geometry-Switching

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 17 Mar 2026] Cascade-Aware Multi-Agent Routing: Spatio-Temporal Sidecars and Geometry-Switching Davide Di Gioia A common architectural pattern in advanced AI reasoning systems is the symbolic graph network: specialized agents or modules connected by delegation edges, routing tasks through a dynamic execution graph. Current schedulers optimize load and fitness but are geometry-blind: they do not model how failures propagate differently in tree-like versus cyclic regimes. In tree-like delegation, a single failure can cascade exponentially; in dense cyclic graphs, failures tend to self-limit. We identify this observability gap, quantify its system-level cost, and propose a lightweight mitigation. We formulate online geometry control for route-risk estimation on time-indexed execution graphs with route-local failure history. Our approach combines (i) a Euclidean spatio-temporal propagation baseline, (ii) a hyperbolic route-risk model with temporal decay (and optional burst excitation), and (iii) a learned geometry selector over structural features. The selector is a compact MLP (9->12->1) using six topology statistics plus three geometry-aware signals: BFS shell-growth slope, cycle-rank norm, and fitted Poincare curvature. On the Genesis 3 benchmark distribution, adaptive switching improves win rate in the hardest non_tree regime from 64-72% (fixed hyperbolic variants) to 92%, and achieves 87.2% overall win rate. To measure total system value, we compare against Genesis 3 routing without any spatio-temporal sidecar, using only native bandit/LinUCB signals (team fitness and mean node load). This baseline achieves 50.4% win rate overall and 20% in tree-like regimes; the full sidecar recovers 87.2% overall (+36.8 pp), with +48 to +68 pp gains in tree-like settings, consistent with a cascade-sensitivity analysis. Overall, a 133-parameter sidecar substantially mitigates geometry-blind failure propagation in one high-capability execution-graph system. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2603.17112 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.17112v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.17112 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Davide Di Gioia [view email] [v1] Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:10:16 UTC (35 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG 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?)