arXiv AI

Decomposition Buys Integrity, Not Yield

arXiv:2609. 17464v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems split a task across a tree of agents and justify the split with folklore: smaller contexts, cleaner separation, parallelism.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

Right-Sizing LLM-Agent Decomposition in VAT Determination: A Pilot Controlled Sweep

The study evaluates how to best split tasks among large‑language‑model agents for cross‑border VAT determination, comparing one broad agent to configurations ranging from one to five narrow agents. Across 4,400 runs—including token‑matched and failure‑injection scenarios—the intermediate configurations achieved the highest accuracy but did not surpass the fine‑endpoint benchmark, leaving the optimal decomposition hypothesis unconfirmed. The pilot provides a preregistered heuristic for right‑sizing decomposition, along with an oracle, dataset, and analysis pipeline.

By Pedro Santos
arXiv AI
1d ago

The Delegation Danger Band: Why Mid-Capability Sub-Agents Over-Trust Inherited Stale State

The paper investigates how inherited state affects sub-agent performance in multi-agent frameworks, comparing three inheritance policies—Reset, Selective, and Full—across a ladder of Qwen3 models. It finds that reliance on stale state decreases with model capability, but a mid-capability model (Qwen3‑1.7B) exhibits a statistically significant local minimum of net harm, defining a "danger band." Selective handoff consistently improves accuracy over Full, especially within the danger band, while a fixed-threshold router fails on other datasets.

By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran