arXiv Machine Learning

Consensus Within, Competition Between: Decentralized LLM Teams for Perimeter Defense

The paper compares three decentralized coordination strategies for large language model (LLM) agents in a perimeter‑defense simulation: a central commander, an auction‑based consensus team, and independent agents. Across five network conditions, the consensus team achieved the lowest breach rate (15%) while the commander and independent agents had higher rates (32% and 29%). The study also explores how network range, LLM authority, and prompt wording affect performance, finding that a dedicated conflict‑resolution protocol yields the fewest breaches.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Reinforcement Learning of Communication in a Mesh of Small Language Models

The paper introduces TalkMesh, a decentralized network of small language model agents that learn to communicate effectively during inference. Each agent proposes an answer, scores it with a confidence head, and the most confident agent broadcasts a hint; lower‑confidence agents revise their proposals if a new suggestion scores higher. This gossip‑based consensus, trained via group relative policy optimization, enables a mesh of three agents to match the accuracy of majority voting over 32 samples, and scales to larger meshes to significantly boost performance on benchmarks like GSM8K and MATH-500.

By Mehmet Kerem Turkcan
arXiv AI
Oct 15

Degrees of Freedom in Multi-Agent Coordination: Between Centralized and Decentralized Regimes

The paper introduces Degrees of Freedom (DoF), a continuous framework that measures how much decision-making is delegated to agents in large language model–based multi‑agent systems. By varying DoF, the authors explore a spectrum between fully centralized and fully decentralized coordination, finding that intermediate settings often outperform both extremes across several task domains. The study shows that task characteristics and retained experience influence how coordination granularity affects performance, offering empirical guidance for designing hybrid coordination regimes.

By Yiqing Peng, Hehai Lin, Zixuan Wang, Dongyi Zhang, Zhengjie Zhu, Yi Han, Yangyang Zheng, Hao Wang, Qian Li, Chengwei Qin
arXiv AI
Jul 1

ClawArena-Team: Benchmarking Subagent Orchestration and Dynamic Workflows in Language-Model Agents

arXiv:2606. 31174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production large language-model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed not as lone problem-solvers but as managers: a main model creates specialized subagents, delegates work, and orchestrates their parallel, asynchronous returns through dynamic workflows.

By Kaiwen Xiong, Haonian Ji, Shi Qiu, Zeyu Zheng, Cihang Xie, Xinyu Ye, Huaxiu Yao
arXiv AI
Oct 2

No One Architecture Fits All: A Cross-Environment Evaluation of Hierarchical Red Team Agents

The study evaluates two hierarchical red team agent architectures—RL planner with RL executor (RL+RL) and LLM planner with LLM executor (LLM+LLM)—across multiple cyber environments. In compact, densely rewarded settings, RL+RL outperforms LLM+LLM, while in larger, escalation‑gated networks a pretrained LLM agent dominates. The results reveal environment‑dependent performance inversions tied to architecture‑specific bottlenecks, challenging the notion that one design is universally superior.

By Ayan Javeed Shaikh, Arunesh Sinha, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Ankit Shah
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Constitutional Gating and Deterministic Recovery for Multi-Agent LLM Negotiation: Ablations Against a Stateful Adversarial Gatekeeper

The paper evaluates a three‑part control stack— a 5‑Pillar runtime constitution, a 4‑tier swarm (Director, majority vote, Monitor, hard gate), and Cognitive Annealing—for multi‑agent LLM negotiation against an adversarial Gatekeeper. Experiments with Gemini 2.5 Pro agents and Claude Haiku 4.5 show that the constitution and Director improve framing but not reliability, the Monitor and hard gate do not reduce unlocks, and deterministic recovery via atomic purge and a canonical strike successfully resolves deadlocks while keeping call budgets unchanged. The study demonstrates that the stack can recover from deadlocks without additional model cost, though it does not reduce overall call or token usage as initially hypothesized.

By Masaaki Nakatsu (AO, Inc. / OrbLabs AG), Reno Wang (AO, Inc.)