Abstract

Many real-world applications require generating a chronological report from an evolving document stream; Timeline Summarization (TLS) provides a standard testbed for this setting. While large language models (LLMs) improve event synthesis, most LLM-based TLS systems remain monolithic: they repeatedly process overlapping evidence and often mirror the corpus’ bursty reporting patterns, producing redundant timelines with temporal/topical imbalance and high cost. We propose **MAS-TLS**, a multi-agent framework that casts TLS as a *newsroom-like* collaboration. A master editor steers balanced coverage by allocating system-visible evidence with a coverage–diversity objective; specialist reporter agents independently draft time-anchored, evidence-grounded events while cross-reviewing to limit redundancy; an adjudication round reconciles competing drafts and consolidates duplicates into a global timeline; and a non-stationary Bayesian controller adaptively staffs agents under token/time budgets. Experiments on three benchmarks show that MAS-TLS improves semantic coverage and temporal grounding while substantially reducing token usage and latency.