State-Centric: An Agent Architecture as an Alternative to the Loop Paradigm

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Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-09-19
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22846546
Primary Topic
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
Type
preprint
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preprint

State-Centric: An Agent Architecture as an Alternative to the Loop Paradigm

Yuancheng Zhang
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
preprint

State-Centric: An Agent Architecture as an Alternative to the Loop Paradigm

Yuancheng Zhang
preprint en

Abstract

This paper proposes the state-centric architecture: an architectural hypothesis that treats persistent state, rather than an external loop, as the foundational structure of an agent. Current mainstream agent architectures are built on a "loop-first" premise, which gives rise to structural bottlenecks: context growth and long-context utilization instability, caching that does not change the structure of history reading, and summarization lacking explicit state constraints that may lose task semantics. This paper identifies the common root of these bottlenecks: the loop paradigm assigns the responsibility for maintaining continuity to the context. By examining the continuity carriers that become possible once that responsibility is relocated out of the context, the paper argues that persistent state is the best-suited carrier among available candidate mechanisms. The state-centric architecture is thereby proposed: state is foundational; loops are emergent. The paper gives the theoretical derivation, the core principles, a four-item operational definition (distinguished by the requirement that no loop control flow exists on the system side), the lifecycle of state, the execution contract, a comparison of three execution semantics with a falsifiable comparative hypothesis, limiting conditions, and the relationship to existing work. Full experimental validation is reported as future work.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
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