arXiv Machine Learning

Two Calls Beat Five Agents: Evaluating Multi-Agent Pipelines Against Self-Refinement for Local Language Models

arXiv:2607. 26922v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM pipeline systems break down the task among multiple roles for better reasoning, but are benchmarked mainly with large-scale commercial models.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

UniACE: A Unified Framework for Evaluating LLM Agentic Capabilities

UniACE is a unified framework that standardizes the evaluation of large language model (LLM) agents by representing each benchmark as an instruction–tool–environment triplet and running models through a shared, task‑agnostic harness in isolated runtimes. It preserves native success criteria, offers an offline mode for dynamic‑resource tasks, and standardizes efficiency metrics, execution records, and failure attribution. Applying UniACE to 7 benchmarks across 24 domains and 15 models revealed significant score shifts, ranking reversals, and sensitivity to evidence representation, highlighting the impact of evaluation configuration on reported agent performance.

By Pengyu Zhu, Lijun Li, Yaxing Lyu, Qianxin Luo, Jingyi Yang, Yi Liu, Tingfeng Hui, Xinyu Yuan, Li Sun, Sen Su, Jing Shao
arXiv AI
Aug 13

VAKRA: Evaluating Multi-Hop Reasoning Across APIs and Retrieval Under Tool-Use Policies

arXiv:2608. 12282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agents deployed in enterprise settings must reason across structured APIs and document collections, yet existing benchmarks evaluate these capabilities in isolation.

By Ankita Rajaram Naik, Anupama Murthi, Benjamin Elder, Siyu Huo, Raavi Gupta, Abhinav Jain, Praveen Venkateswaran, Abdulhamid Adebayo, Danish Contractor
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Architectural Design, Not Only Model Intelligence, Governs Multi-Agent LLM Performance

The paper argues that the architecture of multi‑agent large language model (LLM) frameworks, rather than just the intelligence of the underlying models, largely determines system performance. It introduces a taxonomy of architectural dimensions—such as orchestration, memory, planning interfaces, specialization, and communication topology—and presents MAFBench, a unified evaluation suite. An empirical study across nine frameworks, keeping the LLM constant, reveals six design principles and shows that choices like orchestration and communication topology can dramatically affect latency, accuracy, and coordination success.

By Abdelghny Orogat, Ana Rostam, Essam Mansour
arXiv AI
Jul 14

AgentAbstain: Do LLM Agents Know When Not to Act?

arXiv:2607. 10059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for autonomous tasks, yet existing evaluations mostly focus on task success rather than whether agents know when to abstain.

By Xun Liu, Yi Evie Zhang, Vira Kasprova, Parisa Rabbani, Pardis Sadat Zahraei, Tianyu Zhang, Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny, Varun Chandrasekaran
arXiv AI
Jul 28

E-Bench: Benchmarking Multi-Step Tool-Use Agents in Real-World Product Scenarios

arXiv:2607. 23722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that interact with stateful environments over multiple steps: gathering hidden information, composing tool calls, and committing state changes.

By Weihuang Zheng, Tianyuan Zou, Eileen Ye, Alphet Liu, Youyong Kong, Ya-Qin Zhang, Duran Zheng, Maxm Pan
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Harbor Adapters and Harbor-Index: Infrastructure and a Curated Meta-Dataset for Large-Scale Agentic Evaluation

Harbor Adapters is a unified evaluation infrastructure that ports over 80 agentic benchmarks, enabling arbitrary agents to be tested across complex environments. The authors performed a large‑scale evaluation of 8 models on 54 benchmarks, using Terminus‑2 and three native harnesses, revealing detailed agent capabilities and failure modes. They also created Harbor‑Index, a curated set of 82 challenging tasks from 29 benchmarks, designed to be affordable yet comprehensive, with the best model achieving a 28.0% pass rate.

By Lin Shi (Audrey), Haowei Lin (Audrey), Zixuan Zhu (Audrey), Xiaoyue Zhou (Audrey), Xiang Li (Audrey), Xiangning Lin (Audrey), Yaxuan Deng (Audrey), Han Xu (Audrey), Yuangang Li (Audrey), Shanda Li (Audrey), Zizhao Chen (Audrey), Hanwen Xing (Audrey), Harsh Raj (Audrey), Bo Chen (Audrey), Quan Shi (Audrey), Steven Dillmann (Audrey), Yipeng Gao (Audrey), Puneesh Khanna (Audrey), Ruofan Lu (Audrey), Chao Beyond Zhou (Audrey), Michael Yang (Audrey), Robert Zhang (Audrey), Siyuan Chai (Audrey), Jiayu Chang (Audrey), Yizhao Chen (Audrey), Xiaokun Chen (Audrey), Yiwei Dai (Audrey), Wenting Yang (Audrey), Hange Liu (Audrey), Minghao Liu (Audrey), Zihan Wang (Audrey), Adnan El Assadi (Audrey), Benedikt Stroebl (Audrey), E. Kelly Buchanan (Audrey), Han Meng (Audrey), Junwei He (Audrey), Longxuan Yu (Audrey), Radin Shayanfar (Audrey), Yukyung Lee (Audrey), Zhikang Dong (Audrey), Allen G Hart (Audrey), Anjiang Wei (Audrey), Anurag Kashyap (Audrey), Arpandeep Khatua (Audrey), Audrey Jixin Zheng (Audrey), Chengrui Ma (Audrey), David Heineman (Audrey), Dubing Chen (Audrey), Hai-Anh Trinh (Audrey), Haishuo Fang (Audrey), Hefan Zhang (Audrey), Hui Shen (Audrey), Issa Sugiura (Audrey), Jiankai Sun (Audrey), Jiechao Gao (Audrey), Junhong Lin (Audrey), Junnan Li (Audrey), Kai Yang (Audrey), Lei Hsiung (Audrey), Maoyu Wang (Audrey), Mengze Tang (Audrey), Nabil Omi (Audrey), Negin Raoof (Audrey), Nicholas Edwards (Audrey), Octavia Guo (Audrey), Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis (Audrey), Pengliang Ji (Audrey), Przemys{\l}aw Hejman (Audrey), Qi Qi (Audrey), Qunshu Lin (Audrey), Richard Zhuang (Audrey), Rui Yang (Audrey), Ruichen Zheng (Audrey), Ryan Marten (Audrey), Shaghayegh Fazliani (Audrey), Shizheng Hou (Audrey), Sicong Jiang (Audrey), Sijie Li (Audrey), Song Bian (Audrey), Terry Yue Zhuo (Audrey), Tianqing Wu (Audrey), Tom Tang (Audrey), Wanjia Zhao (Audrey), Weihao Xuan (Audrey), Wenhua Liang (Audrey), Xian Liu (Audrey), Xin Lan (Audrey), Xuan Zhang (Audrey), Xuandong Zhao (Audrey), Yanchuan Tang (Audrey), Yifan Jiang (Audrey), Yijiang Li (Audrey), Yitong Guan (Audrey), Yizhi Li (Audrey), Yonghui Liu (Audrey), Yuheng Tang (Audrey), Yujun (Audrey), Mao, Yunfei Zhao, Yuxin Wang, Yuxuan Tang, Zhenheng Tang, Zhifei Li, Ziruo Wang, Ziyu She, Kaiyuan Liu, Iheb Chaabane, Yuxin Tang, Xiangyi Li, Andy Konwinski, Boxuan Li, Leon Liangyu Chen, Alex Dimakis, Nicholas Carlini, Soroush Vosoughi, Di He, Etash Guha, Benjamin Feuer, Mike Merrill, Ludwig Schmidt, Alex Shaw
arXiv AI
Jun 12

The Illusion of Multi-Agent Advantage

arXiv:2606. 13003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prevailing wisdom posits that Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are superior to Single-Agent Systems (SAS), citing advantages like context protection, parallel processing and distributed decision-making.

By Prathyusha Jwalapuram, Hehai Lin, Chuyuan Li, Fangkai Jiao, Sudong Wang, Yifei Ming, Zixuan Ke, Chengwei Qin, Giuseppe Carenini, Shafiq Joty